I suspect your 'tags' is not a dict object, but some extension of it. Lookup its type, or the documentation of the library you are using for how to retrieve values from an ID3 object.
Looking at the docs, it looks like it's an instance of ID3Tags, which appears to be based on couple of helper classes mutagen._util.DictProxy and mutagen._tags.Tags, where DictProxy (and its base DictMixin) provides the dict-like interface. Underneath that, it looks like it's storing the actual values in a simple dict (DictProxy.__dict) and proxying to that.
I'm not seeing anything obvious that would muck with the incoming lookup key anywhere in ID3Tags or DictProxy.__getitem__ or any of the other base classes.
I have to jump off to pack for a trip, but might try this out later in a live shell session to see if there's something odd going on with the API.
In the meantime, OP, are you positive you were looking at the same file each time? Was this in a script or in a live Python shell session?
So I tried all the different methods you mentioned but everyone fails and so when I took a deep breath, I figured that I'm probably not understanding properly how it works.
I can say this without a doubt though, the needless complexity regarding these rating tags is stupid. I don't understand why people thought this made sense. It's illogical!