I think the problem is that you don’t actually want the general sentiment of the population: it most likely leads to things you’ll accept, but not actually want (ie movies you’re lukewarm on).

I think what recsys really should be trying to target is finding the group most similar to your tastes, and then picking based on the outliers of that group. The goal being to find something within your tastes, but far enough from your normal to be interesting

Recommending based on star personalities preferences, is I think, a way of approaching this idea: why would you want to know what the average item is? You want the best one.