Exactly Cindi. I see a lot of thumbs up being given to pending images and I think that's where most of them occur because it's often several thumbs up in the order of the pending images. Like I mentioned above, there were several thumbs up given for rose foliage and perhaps rose hip images while they were in the pending queue. As originally intended, those thumbs up are given for those that agree the image is correct, or probably many gave them as they appreciated the image. That's all well and good but what happens is as Cindi said, now those images took the front row spot and are now representative for the plant in the thumbnail genus listing and even moderators often can't change it with an extra thumbs up for another image. We worked very hard not to be partial on Cubits, I personally try to leave myself out of the equation unless all the images were mine in an entry, then I picked my favorite, but we do miss the option to change the the order of the images. That would be hard though now with all the new images being added.
Maybe as Cindi suggested, a sparing use of a moderator override might be good just to select that one representative image, but not all genus listing have moderators.