I think the question is do you have an obligation to be engaged with the community. I think the answer should be obvious. An account with no engagement and is the in top 100 ( not saying you have no engagement ) smells of something odd imho.

You do recognize that "this being the only metric that you go by" is a strawman argument that you guys introduced. It's not even present in the original posting. It's entirely synthetic.

Saying "you can see the results of this and decide what to do with your vote" is not, pointedly not, the same as saying "use this and only this to decide what to do with your vote." The difference between those two things cannot be invisible to you.

Every metric – including all of the ones that you guys have put forward – provides an utterly incomplete picture of who is doing what. The problem with your suggestions is that they put the onus of getting what you want on the populace of voters, with the subtle implication (or not-so-subtle) that you are entirely too busy as a group to care about campaigning for all of those tiny minnow votes that you say are so important to you.

Yes, I said "campaigning."

Repeatedly, it's been said that voters should be careful with their vote and only vote for people who share their vision and their plan for the future. Okay, I want to take you at your word. I believe that we want to take you at your word.

But if I take you at your word, I have to wonder – and I mean this wholeheartedly – why the group of you haven't done something like this post on your own initiative, providing a weekly or biweekly post under a specific blog entry as a new account, where everyone is invited to see and read witness responses to questions which are chosen from the previous week or two that witnesses have seen floating around in the community. After all, we are supposed to believe that your active in the community and thus will have seen questions which come up repeatedly?

But you haven't done that. Not only that, you show active hostility to the idea.

Why is that?

This could've been a vast nonissue a year ago, if someone had said, "hey, votes are important, I'd like to take up the mantle of the local broadcast news agency and arrange town halls where the community can interact with interested witnesses!" And then, instead of taking it is an imposition or as an insult that you might be question, the witnesses might have simply taken it as an opportunity, built a forum (in the classic sense), and avoided seeming like they want to have the role of aristocracy without even the chance of the rabble gathering outside their walls.

Optics. Basic optics.

You can see why people who you (witnesses) have said out right are very tiny fish indeed but may be important in aggregate because they're less likely to be swayed by whimsy might want to be treated like that. They might want to see you act like you actually believe that.

We, too, only have a limited amount of time and energy – and a limited amount of the ability to care.

You guys are really working hard to make that last point the most important one.