Regarding what you said about Red Hat, I'm sure that -at least historically- RPM-based distros were simply a pita to work with when compared to the alternatives. I'm a relative new Linux user (only about 3 years so far), so I've only seen its better days :P .

I think you can't, because it requires each voter to rank their preferences, which requires a specific form of voting mechanism. I didn't participate in the poll, but if it was run as ranked choice, and if we had access to the raw, per-voter results, and if the sample size was sufficiently large; then yeah - we could run a full Condorcet count and get some interesting answers!

I'm not particularly well-versed on some of these terms. However, isn't it possible to retroactively make the gradings work as ranked choice? So, say a user gave:

• Arch a 4,
• EndeavourOS a 5
• and Manjaro a 3

Wouldn't this imply that they rank EndeavourOS higher than Arch, and both of them higher than Manjaro? Sure, we won't always have strict orderings. But I'm pretty sure this doesn't necessarily constitute a problem.

Regarding 'distro-buckets', I think that defining a distro different from another whenever (an attempt at) applying the inverse of the changes doesn't produce a functional system is cool. I hadn't considered that before. But, as you've noted yourself, this is a gargantuan effort and (probably) not worth it. Like, e.g. let's look at Deepin, it's mostly Ubuntu with the Deepin desktop environment. However, their respective auras are very different. I think we'd lose a lot of nuance by placing them in the same bucket. Just my 2 cents*.