I don't think it's a matter of taste. What people are griping about isn't that they don't share the other voters' taste. It's that popularity is what is determining the winners, rather than any quality of the image.

I mean, look at what happened with the PC Gallery over at DAZ. The entries were supposed to be anonymous, in order to eliminate that clique element. You weren't supposed to post your images elsewhere until after the voting, in order to keep them anonymous. But people were cheating, posting them here, then deleting them before the winners were announced, so that if people complained, DAZ would have no proof the image had been posted elsewhere with a name attached.

Why would people bother to do that, if it was taste that was dictating the winners? They wouldn't. They were doing it because they wanted to let their friends know which image was theirs.