I agree 100%. This poll bullshit ruins a lot of games. Often what happens is the people with the loudest voices, are those with more fringe fetishes/tastes, and they are willing to drop $$$ on a random porn game that scratches their itch.
If you look at A Struggle With Sin as an example, everyone is always voting for like the oldest, heaviest set, least 'classically attractive' type characters to get more content, or for there to be more sharing/NTR/cuck type content.
A House in the Rift is similar, the Patreon crowd wants more content for Yona (literally a giant jacked up masculine orc character) but the thin, petite feminine characters get the short end of the stick lately.
The other thing is everyone starts chiming in with this "oh wouldn't it be great if there was -----" bullshit and then more characters, features, etc. get added, and progress slows to a fuckin crawl.
While I agree with a lot of your post, getting more Yona content in my eyes makes a lot of sense. This game has quite a few characters, and the "petite ones" are heavily ahead in development. Surely, partly justified by the story - they just arrived earlier and had more time - but still, if these characters are in, they need their dev time, too, and there should be some balance.
Especially since this is a sandbox-ish game, also we get a pretty distorted view when we watch such a game in progress because development (not of the game but of the relationships) speeds will be quite different in the finished game than we experience during any time in development, unlike a VN which is presented during development more or less as in the final game (some changes notwithstanding).
Also, while I do prefer the Lyriels and Caits to the Yonas myself, I wouldn't call inclusion of a more diverse cast "fringe", and I think, since we're drawing heavily from fantasy tropes here, the basic characters were the dev's idea from the beginning, and not some Patreon poll result "We want an Orc".
But as I said, dev idea should always trump Patreon votes, at least when major elements are concerned. A "which haircut do you prefer for the character that's coming next update" should be okay, a "Do you want futa in the game or not" however I wouldn't put down to the audience.