Since I'm very rarely able to participate to respond to questions or statements I've decided to try to start responding in the hangout threads to keep the replies within context. I will keep updating this as I listen to the recording.
Poll participation
The abstain option is there to signal that the voter knows the poll is important but lacks the knowledge to place a yes or no vote. The voter trusts that the ones who voted in either direction do, so abstain is a way for the voter to push the poll towards acceptance without affecting the outcome. We should not discourage people from using this option, nor should anyone be pushed in either direction. Getting people to vote regardless of how they vote is a good thing.
UI rework
Remember that the foundation funds were meant to go towards improving the coin. That includes development, advertisement and overall brand recognition.
Priorities
Product development is about balancing resources between new development and maintenance. Parts of the new development comes as requests from the userbase, things they ask for. Equally important is to work on things which have not been asked for but still is needed for coin progress. Examples of this, besides the UI reworks, are Travis, optimizations, contract forwarding, wallet beacon storage and smart contracts. These have not been requested, but if we were to take such functionality away it would be a huge hit to the usability and performance.
Gaming vote weight
It does sound like an issue. What we should do is maybe have the users' vote weight be dynamic as long as the poll is active. Once the poll finishes all the users' balances and magnitudes can be tallied up and the final poll result can be calculated.
RE: Gridcoin Community Hangout #068