@dutch: Guys..... that's

Guys..... that's nonsense! The majority of your voting weight is based on your coin ownership.

This is just plain wrong. Your voting weight is defined as:

Weight = ((Total coins)/115000/5.67)*(Magnitude) + Balance

What this means is that every coin adds 1 to your weight, while each unit of magnitude adds about 620 to your weight. In my situation, my weight without mag is 23,000 while my weight with mag is scraping 3,000,000. That being said, I still think we should accept the poll results - but lets be clear on the system.

my biggest concern with Gridcoin is that I feel as though we operate based on the assumption that we are in competition with nobody

I don't see where this is coming from? We do openly assume (correctly, I might add) that we have the only functioning platform. There are many competitors as Jringo has listed, including GOLEM, iEx, and SONM, but none of them have the platform we tap into with BOINC.

I'm actually a bit disappointed that the KDS/SPARC team chose to paint Gridcoin in such a negative light

They did not just do that. They openly:

Lied about the coin and dev team (although we could put it down to misinformation being spread accidentally...). The website is still not updated after they said that would be changed.
Claim to be 'fellow Gridsters' but then seem to have no idea about what is actually going on with the coin.

Now, I would like to address some concerns with SPARC, if you will humour me:

Their first round ICO has made some USD$20 worth of ETH at this stage... I find this very suspicious given that there is also a USD$50,000 withdrawal which looks like it came from them in the first place. Neuralminer traced back through the addresses to check this, and it stands.
They have given ZERO indication of SPARC distribution, both between users and between projects. This is a black box and some SPARC may or may not appear on your account once in a while.
The ICO whitepaper is outdated, and riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes.
Their website appears to serve the signup page without a secure connection
They aim to integrate MATLAB, Comsol, and some other software packages into this compute platform. I am intimately familiar with these packages through my engineering background and see colossal problems regarding data transfer and licensing. I can give a full explanation if anyone is interested, but this is far from trivial.

I will give these guys the benefit of the doubt, and hope they clean up their act. That being said, there is a lot of alarm bells ringing and I am not impressed with their treatment of GRC.