[jcrites]

Lots of folks from Amazon participate in Hacker News, like Tim Bray, Colm MacCarthaigh, and Jeff Barr. Jeff Barr often comments in threads about announcements he's written. One of Tim's blog posts was recently on the front page [1]. See: timbray, colmmacc, jeffbarr

I doubt there's any kind of voting cabal, but if folks are participating then they're probably voting according to their inclinations. (I don't vote too much myself, either on comments or articles.)

Any time you invent a new technology with a unique interface, then software built using that technology is coupled to it to some extent. It's actually fairly rare for software components to be so completely interchangeable that you can swap out implementations without changing the software that uses it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20210850