I will probably post updated lists often, and draw attention to things that we probably need to start thinking about; it doesn't mean older subjects are now decided. It means (especially the former) I don't want to fall too far behind on the suggestions, and end up forgetting about some of them altogether.
You might want to compile a list of all comments sorted by level. Every time you want to update the list according to opinions posted, you have to check all previous remarks anyway to see that there aren't comments contradicting the recently stated opinion.
The main reason behind the polls is that there are often people who do have an opinion on the subject, but for whatever reason don't wish to make a post about it - perhaps they don't want to say "Do this, it's just what I feel would be best and can't explain why"; perhaps they'd rather give their opinion anonymously; and so on.
Yes, this is a good reason to have polls at some point. But my argument still stands, that we shouldn't vote without having a discussion first.
...perhaps in the meantime we should start on some backroute fixes for levels we can be fairly certain will get in.
Why backroute fixing levels at all? Aren't most of the L1 levels
meant to have lots of alternative solutions? And if we really want to backroute fix levels, we run in a few problems: For most levels, I cannot see one specific solution that I would be reasonable sure to be the "intended" one. Secondly, with the huge amount of skills most levels give the player, backroute fixing will turn out to be very hard. And thridly, even if we succeed in backroute fixing, this will likely result in
huge changes to level.
All in all, I thought the intention was to essentially use the original levels, and not to create challenge versions of them that force the player to use a specific solution?
One level we can perhaps start with - this scored 3rd place in the voteoffs, so I think we can be fairly sure it's getting in - is Mayhem 13.
Usually your eagerness to get things done helps a lot to reach decisions at some point. However this time I feel you are too eager. Forum threads are a very linear structure, which makes them a bad place to have multiple discussions about different subjects (which levels to include, how many, how to backroute, ...) in them. So I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to purely focus on the level selection right now, even if that means that we only discuss and don't decide anything for the next one or two weeks.
Regarding Mayhem 13: Even with your suggested fixes, the attached solution works.