I'm not sure, specifically, who you're referring to here. As you say, the metrics have changed, but over 90% of the names on the first page of the profile list are heavy users of the fora. For the longest time, I remember the top 10 karma owners being people who provided the most popular applications in Extras: these are names people should recognise.

Which is all fine and reasonable, except why was the vitriol directed at the council members who were trying to answer questions; rather than at Reggie who was the only one who could control what happened to his baby?

Not that I'd like to have seen that spite at Reggie, but the whole thing about that period was that it was a small number of people venting their spleen about something. I'm not sure what it was, and although your explanation seems logical at first glance, I'm not sure it holds up either.

But what has the voting got to do with the transition of ITT to tmo? The decision wasn't one taken by the council, but the council were on hand to try and help with the transition. There were lots of comms (revisit the threads, seriously) before the URL change, during the theme design and after the default theme changed.

All of the people leading the complaints (IIRC) were entirely able to vote; indeed in the last election one of them stood, and won! It's ironic that this proponent of "forum only" members almost entirely dropped off the radar for the last 6 months, despite running on a campaign of "more communication".

Anyway, ITT has earned karma for ages (and there've been repeated attempts to get more people to link their accounts); doing any activity on maemo.org (including rating a download) earns karma and all three elections (and the referenda) have been heavily promoted here.

If the council really were making sure far reaching decisions, a "forum only" member has no excuse for not being aware or involved. This is why, at the last election, I made sure I worked with Reggie to ensure that every tmo account which would be eligible to vote, but wasn't linked to a maemo.org account, received a personalised email giving them the exact steps to create an account on maemo.org and link it with their tmo account such that they could get the karma they were owed.