Re: Story length / votes
You base your premise of vote tabulation on the comments. We base our vote tabulation on the actual votes. There are three categories and those with longer stories last year did not do nearly as well on the "How much did you enjoy this story". One of the factors was vote length. Thus - less votes AND lower numbers.
Comments are not factored into the score other than a commentor of the week award.
You are basing this on a straight average and the vote tabulations are not a straight average due to the other factors we put into play (ie, commentor of the week awards).
I appreciate the thought that you put into this but you are not seeing all the factors and how those factors led into the vote tabulation.