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A few excellent observations & reasoning in your answer. Especially the piling on of votes, first votes often decide the direction. Voting in general is useful and a good indication, individual cases make no sense sometimes however, and like in real life, people find it difficult to have an opinion against what seems mainstream.
The number of my upvotes is a multiplication of my downvotes, but can't recognize myself in the generalization of your happy upvoters. I downvote if I see an answer that is utterly wrong or harmful, or answers that stay in a very poor state after comments to improve, or cannot be saved by an good edit anyway. Over time (really) often saw downvotes on posts that must have been for reasons of taste, or simply "I am having a bad day, feel like shooting at something". Then finally, there are indeed a few silly upvotes on bad posts. Pretty sure they are outnumbered by dubious downvotes though.
To be honest, I don't read documentation until I am interested in in a specific part of the background of something. Even in programming, I didn't get where I am reading documentation, but mostly doing and thinking logically, - then - read the docs. Average user gets here to fix a problem, not to read a tour. If they stick around, they will find out how and what about the site by experience and communication with others, - then - maybe read the tour.
