Dyver, I understand that you’re cynical, but I don’t understand where the cynicism comes from.
Do you see any evidence that Goons or any of the other nullsec block candidates are “swaying CCP’s opinion” into their favor? I don’t. As Innominate and others have said - we all play this game and we want to keep playing it. That means making it fun and ensuring that folks have reasons to fight and a desire to do that, as well as do all the other stuff that helps drive conflict. It isn’t in anybody’s interest to implement game mechanics that literally benefit only one group of players over the majority of the community, and the CSM doesn’t have that power anyway.
The Devs aren’t stupid. If somebody puts forward a completely self-serving idea, they’re going to get called out on it.
And yes, there is a relevant context change for the voting process this year - the timing was completely different, the election period was completely different, you had a scandal in the middle that impacted ballots, you had a different number of candidates, you had a larger number of incumbents running again than in the past. The only thing consistent between this election and the last one was the STV system. Everything else was different. And the differences between CSM 11 and CSM 12 are manifold, including the reduction in size from 14 to 10.
Comparisons are nice, but you’ve got compare apples to apples. It’s hard to do that when each election introduces changes that can impact turnout and the final results.