Anthere:
In a sense, results are easier to read now for you as they have only one interpretation (number of supporters), while before they had two interpretations (number of supporters AND degree of support).
It's a very bad idea to use a rating system with a large scale (e.g. from 1 to 1000), as everyone will use it differently and the average becomes meaningless (as does the individual vote unless you look at that person's entire voting record). The other problem was that, due to the terminology "vote", many people were likely to assume that they only had a single vote.
A 1-5 rating system (without the term "vote") would probably be optimal, but the current solution is a big improvement to make the statistics more meaningful, which will be useful to the Research Team.
Best,
Erik