Thanks, that's extremely helpful. Based on how this is built, it might not actually be that hard to migrate over to the aggregation framework. I'll take a look.
It looks like this has disappeared from the front page despite 13 votes in 36 minutes. I assume it was flagged :-(
I understand it's a controversial topic, but I don't think this post violates any of the submission guidelines. If this was flagged, I would really appreciate feedback as to why. I don't want to invest time in future posts that might not see the light of day.
Sure I'd have no problem with that. There is a vote convergence system in the backend so there will be a bunch of raw votes on each image that I could easily export if someone wanted them.