You're listening to the wrong sort of criticism if you think this was a failure.
Everything might not have been puppies and rainbows, and I'm not saying don't try to improve on the system, but the tournament was fair and all the (unfortunately unironic) drama was due to people being idiots and/or butthurt. And that was going to occur to a large extent regardless of what happened or how it happened. I'm not speaking for anyone else, but even in the results that made me lose faith in Myouren-kind I could always pick out at least one reason (
besides popularity) - even if it were the outlandish notion held by some that this was the fanon seimoe contest and not the Touhou one - that could justify why an unequivocally lesser moehou prevailed.
And not having a gazillion-jillion votes doesn't somehow invalidate the results from our sample set. Thinking that this had to represent every hikikomori this side of the Pacific is not only silly but marginalizes the contributions of everyone who did vote. I think we had a nice little crowd of hooligans and we can be proud of the inanity we raised. And while some of the banter was admittedly cringe-worthy, most of it was in good humor, and I at least had a lot of fun participating (aside from having to witness the rng-induced matchup of mombrella and moebrella; that was just plain mean). I was also able to deepen my well of useless knowledge from all the reading up on characters that I did. And this... is...... a good thing?
Besides, if nothing else, this tourney gave us the Parsee thread, and
this tender moment made it all worthwhile.