The vote limits are actually a core feature/limitation of the Voting plugin for Discourse (this forum), and their necessity/utility is somewhat debated. What Chris describes is the understood value, which is largely asserted by the Discourse dev/team and is arguably a matter of opinion rather than hard data. It makes a certain kind of psychological sense, i.e. if you have unlimited votes you may vote for things that really aren’t that important to you, there is no real “cost” to do so (except time), and since all votes “count” the same (have the same value), it may reduce the “quality of signal” that is given to the devs based on these votes. I would personally love to see some real studies done on this kind of stuff, but I’m not aware of any.
Interestingly Michael himself has already expressed elsewhere that:
He then increased the votes for the top Trust Level (4) to 100, and TL3 (us) to 50, I think. I don’t know if what he said above means he truly does not see value in the limit, in which case he might as well set it to 1000, or if he just thought the defaults were too low. I don’t know of anyone with 100 votes in any case, and it may be that the “substance”/sustainable level of activity of this community simply does not produce Trust Level 4 users in any meaningful quantity (going by Chris’ stats below I’d be inclined to say that with more confidence!). The Discourse defaults assume a certain level of activity should be needed to gain that Trust Level, and also builds-in certain fairly powerful abilities to TL4. Neither of those defaults may match well with the actual use/activity of this forum (which frankly is shockingly low as-per Chris’ numbers 
). In any case if there is a mismatch and Fibery team wants to address it, one of two things should probably be done.
- Adjust the TL4 requirements so that more people reach TL4. This has other consequences, TL4 users are fairly powerful, so I don’t know if this is desirable, but can be considered.
- Simply give TL3 users (you and I) 100 votes as well. This is obviously simpler/faster and has less additional consequences.
I also want to call out another important point in that thread I linked to up there 
which connects much more with your concerns about the disconnect between - and resulting lack of transparency in - Discourse vs. internal feature/issue tracking, importance and priority, etc. Here’s the key quote from Michael:
Their recent work on Forms and public sharing quite obviously orients towards exactly this critical use case. So I think they are moving as quickly as they reasonably can toward this goal. Already the Docs are there in Fibery itself. Once external user reg and/or anonymous user activities are supported, I think that almost everything will actually already be in place to support the important parts of the use case. With Forms we can submit new issues and feature requests. With Sharing we can see everything that Fibery team wants to share, including Bugs and Feature Requests. With end-user registration or anonymous interaction we can Vote and maybe even Comment. Alternatively/additionally each Feature could link to a Discourse Topic for further and more in-depth discussion, while the actual Voting and Priority is shown easily in Fibery.
Edit: I also want to add that I think this is a really good focus area for Fibery, not only because Forms have a ton of other uses, but because I think that the current market for “feedback management” tools is full of hot garbage, which is to say all the existing options are some degree of bad. ProductBoard is arguably the worst of the bunch, pretty poor IMO. Canny is OK, a few other newer ones are basically just Canny clones with cheaper pricing or other minor benefits. But they’re all over priced, have limited integrations, and do not do project/task/dev management well with any native features they might have in that area. I’d love to think (and I certainly hope) that Fibery can steal a bit of the high-priced Canny market once they have this set of features in place, because they will almost indisputably be an otherwise far superior solution given the integration with real, and extremely powerful work management. The only potential issue I see is that Fibery probably won’t implement a forum-like system, although if external Comments are allowed it may be good enough.
So I think you can look forward to that (hopefully) addressing many of your concerns to some reasonable degree. And quite honestly then what I’d really love to hear some info/estimates on is when Fibery team thinks it is likely to be possible! Rather than specific, snapshot-in-time of priority of this feature or that, it would be great to know when we can reasonably hope for (though probably not expect 
) this greater integration and transparency.
Awww dang, really? I’m shocked! 
(it’s OK, I forgive you)
)