It's true! There's a lot that can be done with Views, CCK, and a sprinkling of additional helper modules. In our recent Drupal Intensive Workshop, we walked people through the process of building a simple Flickr clone using the same combination of modules. (http://www.flippr.net/ is where we stuck the resulting demo...)

I'd also lean towards Fivestar module instead of jRating, but I'm also biased. ;-)