Vocals > Instrumentals:

I flipped 13 more 5-star songs to 4-star, and 4-star songs to 5-star.  All 13 had something in common -- the downgraded songs were instrumental pieces, and the upgraded songs had vocalists.  Anime and visual novel songs with beautiful female vocalists like Yukari Tamura, Yui Ogura, Yui Horie or Yui Sakakibara.

The instrumental songs, which are still great, just not as great as these anime opening and ending themes, come from a wide range of composers -- Uematsu, Shimomura, Mitsuda, Mizoguchi, Magome, Masashi, Masuhara. . . nobody was spared, because I needed more room and it had to come from somewhere.

The end result of all this effort was to bump my anime and visual novel percentage of my 5-star hall of fame to slightly over 33%, or 1/3.  The video game section was cut down to 64%, with western music soaking up the remaining 3%.

The 5-star songs with vocals is around 31%, close to the anime percentage but not exactly parallel.  There are instrumental anime and visual novel songs, and likewise there are vocal game songs, which basically cancel each other out and produce the same proportion.  You would think the human voice is such a powerful tool it should completely dominate the 5-star category, but nope, instrumentals tend to be the superior tunes.  Instruments have a power of their own -- you can combine hundreds of them at once into a single melody, and they can produce sounds no voice can.

Vocalists tend to dominate and drown out the rest of the music, so you're almost listening to their voice alone.  Instrumental pieces can symbiotically work together many different threads of overlapping melodies and beats.  Vocalists can lend emotional weight to a song instruments can't, so their sheer power isn't always a bad thing.  Though there are two great 5-star instrumental songs for every great 5-star vocalist song, I bet if I looked at the top 100 songs instead of the top 1100, vocal pieces would come out on top.  The most memorable, emotional songs really do require a singer as a sort of apex predator.

But oh well, I don't have to prove songs with vocalists are better than songs without, all I have to do is say they're relatively more worthy than my initial ratings gave them credit for.  That's the only point I'm trying to make right now.

Male vocalists are just barely hanging in there -- I believe there are 3 5-star songs with male vocals, compared to over 300 with female.  But my advice to male musicians is, in general, to shut up and compose, because you can't compete with the beauty of a female's voice no matter how loudly you shout.

If anyone wants to know which songs are rated exactly what, or who the overall best composers/performers are, the details are always kept up to date on my Good Music permapost.

Meanwhile, I'm 3/5 of the way through my 31st '100 Waifus' re-read and re-edit.  So far, other than switching out the Tabitha nickname for the proper Charlotte name, all the changes have been minor grammar or phrasing issues.  But lots of minor phrasing improvements add up over time, they're definitely worth doing.  One word out of place can make a whole sentence feel unnatural, whereas one perfectly placed word can make a paragraph as smooth as butter.  The changes are all minor, but it's impressive how many more edits I had to make this time compared to the 30th, showing there's still room for improvement when it comes to this book.

I've also finished my One Piece/One Pace rewatch.  This includes rewatching for the first time the Wano eps that came out last year, so it was also fulfilling my oath of rewatching all great anime.  Wano has been a bad, boring arc so far.  The manga is also dragging, One Piece had a multiple week vacation over Christmas/New Year's, came out with one chapter yesterday, and now is back on break again.  It's incredibly frustrating.  There are lots of interesting things happening outside of Wano that I want to know more about, lots of prophecies and foreshadowing about cool future events, but we can't get to any of them so long as we're stuck endlessly fighting on Wano.  The Wano arc still isn't close to finished, and it's already the longest arc of the manga by far.  Come on, Oda, enough is enough! On the other hand Nami and Robin are very pretty in kimonos, so there's that. . .

Keep careful watch of the Cue! anime, it might be the next Idolm@ster or Selection Project.  Lots of cute girls competing to do a great thing that brings out the best in girls (their beautiful voices and wide range and versatility of emotional expression), I've seen this formula before and every time it ended up being a great (top ranking) anime.  Considering three of my ranked series are mere phantoms, which haven't even been announced as anime yet, there's plenty of room for series like Cue! to get in, too.  I just need a little more proof that the plot and characters will hold up and won't take a crazy right turn about heart transplant ghosts like Idoly Pride did.