18 songs flipped:

There were a lot of good songs in my 3-star tier.  Average quality within the parameters of a music hall of fame where every song has to be listened to and liked at least 100 times turns out to be pretty high quality.  I only had 18 songs available for demotion from my 4-star tier, so the 3-star tier had to fight it out within itself for those few spots, despite many deserving entries.

The demoted songs were mostly from the Tales and FF Tactics franchises, as well as weaker anime songs and assorted riffraff.  What's more exciting is which songs, out of all 1100 contenders in the 3-star tier, managed to get promoted to 4-star.  (And who knows, once you reach 4-star, maybe someday you'll be promoted to 5-star?  At least now you're within shooting distance.)

The eighteen champions that outcompeted the other 1082 songs in my 3-star tier for the promotion are "How" by the Cranberries, "The Eyes of Truth" by Enigma, "Distorted Flash of Light,", "Trial of Binding," and "Trial of Echoes," from Fire Emblem Engage, "Rise up Dream" from Extreme Hearts, "Stormwind" and "The Mistweaver Monks" from World of Warcraft, "The Breaking of the Fellowship" from Lord of the Rings, the opening themes to FF XI and FF XIV by Nobuo Uematsu, "Elvira Madigan" by Mozart, "Rain of Stars" from Record of Lodoss War, "You Take my Breath Away" by Sarah Brightman, "Lost Blue Skies" from Crest of the Stars, "Hokage" and "Girei" from Naruto, and "Jr." from Xenosaga.

I hewed to the standard of 'moving and memorable' is what gets you promoted, and all these songs fit that requirement.  7 of the 18 songs are from western works which goes to show the west ain't bad.

All the details can be found in my good music permapost.  It would be nice if my mission ended here, but of course I have to do the 2-star tier and the 1-star tier next.  Only then can I say my music hall of fame is totally merit based (instead of unfairly discriminating against longer songs) and scored correctly.