I'm noticing a trend on meta posts that offer clear positions to vote on: Someone writes a clear meta post, offers multiple options to vote on, and someone comes along and posts an answer that is not really an option and leaves us no better off than when we started, often by posting an answer that is already represented by one of the existing options, the whole thing devolves into voting chaos, and no clear decisions can be made

Seems to be the pattern

I like meta because we can have all the opinions and theory

But perhaps there is a need for some sort of authoritative polling system as well

Not sure how that works

Meta is great to find out if we are missing any positions first of all, but then take a vote in some organized fashion with fixed choices

meh, just speculating