I agree with you totally Badcop, but over the last couple of months I've developed a new attitude toward voting and the contests in general. In the end it just isn't worth it. I just don't vote for things I know were not much work (depending on the experience of the poster), or that I personally don't care for (ie; the bloodbath and blatant violent posts). Let me give you a personal example from the recent sharp tree contest.
My entry started out as trying to build a sunset from scratch, although it ended up looking like a sunset from a different planet ... which I liked even better. That contest was replete with sunset pictures, most or all of which were just sunset image pastes. Many of these left mine in the dust from a vote perspective, even though I'm sure my entry took much more time to do and involved many more PS techniques (hue/sat and color adjust clip layers, drawing the clouds from scratch, etc.). But here's the way I look at it, I now know how a build a sunset from scratch
I'm sure I could make a convincing realistic sunset too, it was just too fun to make a spacey one.
Ultimately, the only one you should be trying to please is yourself. You will drive yourself crazy worrying about votes and wins. These days I am elated if I just hang around the first page, because then I know more people will see an image I really liked, and enjoyed doing.
The one thing I like to do is look at the late entries, and newbies posts, and spread some votes around there. I think this encourages people to keep entering. I vote for entries here I would never vote for if it was an Anfa, Rey, Serps, Claf or Marco pic ... but they deserve some love too.
Anyway, this is a worhtwhile subject to look at now and again but it will never be perfect. And as Blue said, we all can use the votes as we wish. I have sinned worse than Nance, but was forgiven ... and ultimately feel that I got a better perspective for the experience.
As the surfers say, move like a jellyfish
(peter paul rubens) 
