League table are interesting but I’d definitely look at it by course too, though there are an anomalies there (Cambridge and Oxford rank top for Sociology but neither offer it as an undergraduate degree, for example).
I didn’t know what RG meant til a friend said her son was going to Sheffield ‘at least he got in to an RG uni’. I don’t think it factored in to my DD’s decision at all, though she was only interested in unis that appeared consistently in the top ten across the various tables as she wanted a tough academic course.