I've got a bundle of mathmateically defensible/supportable ideas about how the voting should be tinkered with. I can make a remarkably strong case for a low-impact, better system. And I'd be flogging that if I were going to advocate anything.
BUTBUTBUTBUTBUT here's the deal:
Running a contest like this is a LOT of hard work. Every little bit of tuning means more coding and probably more overhead. And at some point, I'd have to think that it would be more trouble than it's worth.
And here's the other bighairyBUT:
No matter how the thing is tuned. No matter how elegantly and perfectly it's honed, there will still be both room for improvement as well as criticism of the thing from the periphery.
So at some point we, as individuals, have to decide if the thing (in whatever form or shape it takes) has enough value to us that we participate...knowing full well the size and shape of the thing.
Last BUT (does this thread make my BUTS look big?):
I think we should all be grateful that the contest party has been thrown for the last couple of years (and quasi-incrementally through the year with the plant weeks).
None of this is to say that there aren't some easy, obvious tunings that might be done. More at trying to look at it from an admin's point of view...and realize the inevitable.
