Regarding contents / geographic vs. cultural areas: I think either would make sense. One way of looking at cultural areas would be the ways that the affiliates spontaneously organized ourselves at WMCON, possibly with a few additions.
Regarding differing population sizes: yes, but there will be imperfections no matter how we arrange a system. Regardless, we can design a system that is better than the one we have now, and I hear no one in this thread saying that the current board structure should be maintained.
Regarding negative votes:
# We use S/N/O for many other kinds of votes, including FDC, steward, Arbitration Committee, and featured content votes. I have not heard disagreement with it until now, which suggests that generally there is consensus for this system.
# If the system was confusing, I would have expected people to ask questions on the vote talk page for FDC and Board elections. While there were other questions on the vote talk page, no one asked about the S/N/O system. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015
# One of the best features of S/N/O is that it works to favor candidates who have consensus for them, i.e. have both a good quantity of supporters and have few people who oppose their election. If someone has many support votes and many oppose votes, this suggests that the person is relatively controversial, which probably makes them a less optimal choice for roles like FDC, Steward, Arbitration Committee, and WMF Board roles.
I'm open to hearing of better systems than S/N/O, but at this point I continue to support S/N/O, and judging by how many kinds of votes we have in the Wikimedia community with the S/N/O system, it appears that there is general consensus for this model.
Pine