But the sting that's meant to come from identifying something as subjective is to indicate that it varies without any independent standard.

Independent from what?

If there independent standards, then there aren't grounds for tractable judgements about which option is better than another, which means that everything goes.

I'm assuming you mean if there aren't independent standards. But of course we can have tractable judgments about which option is better than another, and we can reject anything goes, even without independent standards. We can use intersubjective standards, which are not at all independent - they depend entirely on us! - but they work just fine and we use them all the time for things like manners and etiquette and which side of the road one ought to drive on. We can in fact make tractable judgments even if the standards are subjective entirely to the individual - "anything goes" is true only if it's up to the individual to make any subjective judgment. But it may be constitutively impossible for individuals to make certain judgments for various reasons. Perhaps I cannot bring myself to love tomato soup.

That's what seems to be the punchline of calling something subjective.

I thought the punchline of calling something subjective is that its truth value changes if certain people change their minds about it, whereas if something's objective, its truth value stays the same no matter what's going on in anyone's mind.

While we may want to distinguish between intersubjectivity and some further standard of objectivity, it does seem like intersubjectivity is on the same side of the 'there are independent standards' line as objectivity.

I don't know how you are drawing the line.

You may disapprove of some course of action that is recommended by some intersubjective standard, but nonetheless acknowledge that it's the action required.

Yes, this looks like what is going on in the case of, for instance, manners. But this does not suggest that manners are objective. We need not be manners realists.

We certainly shouldn't lump together subjective and intersubjective standards.

Yes we should.

For instance, it's not hard to imagine scenarios where some intersubjective standard recommends something that everybody subject to it dislikes it, but conforms nonetheless.

I don't see how this tells us anything interesting except that some people dislike things. Perhaps your view of subjectivity is something like "if something's subjective, the answer is something you'll like, because if you disliked it, you'd realize that the answer's subjective so you'd just change the answer." But this is false - subjective truths can be truths we dislike, either because we don't want to or can't change the answer, even though the answer depends on us.

This is easiest in cases where individuals would each prefer some different course of action, though there are cases where everybody agrees on some course of action and some other course of action would be preferred by everybody. So, the intersubjective standard overrules the subjective standard.

By "subjective standard" it seems like you have in mind "the standard people like" and by "intersubjective standard" it seems like you have in mind "the standard people think they ought to follow." This is a fine (albeit idiosyncratic) way of talking, but I'd lump both of those things firmly into subjectivist territory. Even better, I'd stop talking like this, because intersubjective and subjective imply nothing about anyone's evaluation in terms of like or dislike.

I can't imagine how this is meant to work.

Margaret Gilbert has good work on this, as do Pettit and List.

For instance, we often say that a society has tastes or inclinations, like we say of subjects, but this seems to be a judgement about what a modal member of that society is likely to be like.

This isn't clearly the right way to cash this out.

This doesn't work to ground something like a society-level subjectivism, because we don't really expect every member of the society to be like that, which means there are intra-societal differences, which (given there are settled approaches to the issue) means there are intra-societal methods for handling these differences, meaning there is some further standard to refer to.

That a standard exists is no evidence that the standard is objective - indeed, the entire point of distinguishing objective from subjective truths is to allow us to point out that not all things that exist are things that exist objectively. If objective and existent were coextensive, the two metaethics options would be moral realism and moral nihilism. There is, however, a third category, namely, moral anti-realism.