The poll that rearranged the roadmap was in July of last year, and received a grand total of 7,297 votes. Even if you make the wildly inaccurate assumption that every person who voted selected every available option (which was possible to do, but was clearly not what happened based on data) then that means they got 291.88 voters, or approximately 10% of their total subscriber count at the time. (Which had leveled out at a bit over 3k, for reference) That is well below the most popular option, which had 980 results. At the minimum, we know a full third of their subscriber count at the time voted on that poll.
If you assume people went by their recommendation of 5 selections, the apparent number of participants is 1,459.4, or nearly half of their subscribers at the time. Heck, that's approaching the turnout US citizens gave during the 2020 election. They never did share the actual numbers, but I imagine that based on the poll results the average number of selections was actually below five. They did a follow-up poll in discord to split the pregnancy content by player pregnancy versus npc pregnancy and decide which of the two comes first, and that on its own picked up nearly 1500 votes.
As mentioned by
muschi26, their latest poll (back in march) had 3539 votes. Like the July poll, you could select as many options as you please. If you deliberately fudged the numbers and evenly split the votes along all options, you'd get a grand total of 321.72 voters. The most popular option on this sex position poll actually picked up 787 votes, which is approximately twenty percent of the subscribers they had at the time as the bare minimum number of voters we know participated.
Considering this was explicitly a "winner takes all" poll (that's how the devs described it), I imagine most voters actually picked only one or two options. If the average was any higher than four, it would put the number of voters below the known minimum. A safe pick for lowball numbers would be three, which gives us 1,179.66 subscribers, or a bit over a quarter of the full subscriber count at the time.
So no, I will not buy in to your claims that their polls are meaningless, nor will I buy into your unsubstantiated and very easy to disprove claims that the polls are letting a tiny fraction of their subscribers drive the project. This project's polls may possibly be minority driven, but the Star Citizen comparison is blatantly disingenous and inaccurate.
And one final note: The developers do not allow polls to dictate new content. They only allow them to dictate the order in which content they already have planned gets implemented. If it's on a poll, it's because the developers plan to add it at some point. This isn't a case of the devs dropping a feature because a poll said it wasn't popular. It's a case of the devs prioritizing other features they didn't realize were as heavily desired as the polls indicated.
