I would be curius to see some statistics about WHO is voting in the votes.
Is it the core waymarkers all evaluating all categories?
Is there a big percentage of people that have never voted before?
I have a gut feeling that some of the categories proposed are getting voted in by GC.com premium members that are buddies of the category proposer. I'd like to see some eveidence to either confirm or deny this suspician.
As far as discussing in the forums goes, in general when constructive criticim is given after the category is being voted on, it turns into a huge forum drama. As I don't have the stomach for forum drama, I quit trying to give constructive criticm, no matter how well intended. I guess that falls into apathy, as identified above.
I did like the idea of the vote comments being visable during the vote. Based on my own experience, there are people who put a lot of effor into writing good comments during the voting. Many times there are things that are noticed by others that I might not have noticed.
As far as 'figuratve' goes, I think it's that two dollar word that scares people away. If the category name was animals and unnamed people, or some words written at a sixth grade level, you might not see the volume of sub-categories. In general, people create a category when they don't see a good place to post something that interests them.