As far as book reviews, professional is professional. I have never, ever read anything on Goodreads that compares at all to something in the London Review of Books for example. They just aren't even in the same category. People who read and review books for a living simply are better at it. They have more context than casuals, they are better writers, they have the education to fully understand a work and place it in context etc. Professionals.

As insular and snobbish as publishing may be, publishers developed taste over hundreds of years. Goodreads, by contrast, is is social media.

I like LRB a lot but it's usually less book review and more 'commentary of the whole field, written by someone who knows it well, and then a paragraph or two in three pages about the contents of this new book on the topic'

There isn’t really enough here that illustrates your aesthetic theory to allow me to respond well.

If you are suggesting that some critics have “better opinions” then I’d basically reject that conception outright. Here I would reference Howard Moscowitz’s theory and practical engineering of tastes to suit different audiences.

If you’re suggesting a trained reviewer can better connect and convey the artist benefit of a work to those who would appreciate those aspects, then I completely agree, but it’s just that we are talking about one specific audience being served that is not easily served, not audiences in general.

If you’re talking about the pleasantness and prose of the written reviews themselves, we end up in a meta-discussion of the aesthetics of review writing.