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It's hard to find an objective rating for crpgs if not impossible that doesn't restrict the genre. Someones good criteria have to be a little ambiguous.

Heres my take on it:

GAMEWORLD:

The game world simulates part of a world big enough to have one or more societies in conflit in their day to day life in the most credible and immersive way possible. The physical laws that govern the habitants of this world apply to every one including the player in the same way.

Notice you can have a futuristic crpg and in that landscape and day/night cycles may not apply. In the same way a weather may not apply either. Even the idea of being free to go anywhere is tricky because crpgs even good ones restrict the player from going to certain places but in a "natural" way.

An important criteria has to do with the world non-linearity of events. How many things can happen at the same time. A dynamic world where events happen without the player intervation is a world that breeds life of it's own and simulates the complexity and deep of a mature crpg much better.

I think that if you divide the crpg world in world types you can then use more objective criteria.

COMBAT:

Combat is too much abused in crpgs realy. This is only one of the many possibilities of gameplay a crpg can offer to solve problems and interact with the world. I think the important thing here is how skills are respected no mater the way the player chooses to solve a problem. Skills impose an upper limit to how well the player can do a certain action. And the more granular and specific skills are the easier it is to balance the game and to create more beliavable and complex characters.

I don't think that spells, tactics and strategies are essential for crpgs. They are essential for combat to be fun but some worlds may not have spells for example. Also what is a monster? It's a type of npc that allways attacks the player. This breaks the criteria that social interaction must be as realistic and mature as possible. Even animals must have a more inteligent behavior than that. AI is allways a good think in particular for the game manager AI that controls the game and enforces the game rules.

STORY:

In a good crpg stories are told from the mouth of crpgs or from books where the story of things passed are described.

I don't know how many stories and quests must be made. It all depends on how much are necessary to provide enough role-palying experiences for each character to experience the world from his shoes. It also depends on how much of the world the game designer wants to show to the player.

About different game-endings i would say better yet not have a game ending or a main quest. A different criteria would be asking does the game has a ending or a main quest and if the main quest is just another quest or all quests turn around this main quest.

NPC-INTERACTION:

Npc interaction is very important. It's how the player percieves the social side of the world and how he changes the world. The most interesting side of crpgs come not from combat but from dialog.

Most important in crpgs is that different social types should solve problems in different ways. If a crpg only provides a minimal amount of ways to solve problems (like only combat most of the cases) it's very hard to create a deep crpg this way.

Trading is something that may exist or not in the world but is also good gameplay and one that is proved to work in many games. If it is present it should work naturaly and in a beliavable way with the rest of the world.

GAMEWORLD MANIPULATION:

I wouldn't say this is essential but the more ways to manipulate a game world the more beliavable the world is and the easier it is to create interesting quests and suprising events. More material to work with. I don't consider this however mandatory to rate a good crpg. Being able to pickup herbs and potions depends on the type of world.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:

Character representation is the easier part. I think an hardcore game should provide at least a complexity that is comparable to Fallout or Gurps light. This could be name, gender, race, physical customization, background, startup inventory, class, perks, quirks, attributes, skills, affiliations per faction, reputation per faction.

An average crpg could get away only with the basic name/gender/customization plus atributes and skills and a basic system of reputations and affiliations.

Joining a faction or a guild and if a guild provides status (ranks) or not again depends on the world. There may be other ways to do afiliations.

Development is the path you make with a certain character in the game world. As the player explores the world with that character and interacts with the world in ways that are adequate for him he will increase his skills, build a certain reputation and social links (afiliations) with npcs. The player builds his story and it's important that the rules are believable, the world is believable, reactions are believable, interaction is believable, dialogs are well writen, characters are interesting for this to be a good story.

This is a point of view biased towards pnps but i think it gives a good idea of what an hardcore crpg represents.

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