I see a lot of "FtX ignores the lower rated players" but not a lot of specifics, so here are some thoughts and some questions I have so we can maybe see how much merit this statement has.
One aspect I saw mentioned, is that there are almost no tournaments for lower rated players. I think that is a fair observation and we could really use more of these. Morax also recently pointed this out in a separate thread. Luckily Suzuji seems to be very motivated to organize some. And because you don't need to be PC to be a tournament director, I'm looking forward to seeing some tournaments from him regardless how this election goes.
It seems like Emperor_Penguin and the players he knows are very unhappy with the maps in the ladder pool. Can you elaborate why the pool "doesn’t prioritize regular player preference, fun, playerbase growth, and new player retention anywhere near as much as it should"?
Also what exactly do low rated players desire, when talking about mapsize is apparently not it? What are these same things that they all dislike as Valki said? And how do you determine that what you and the people you talked to is representative to the playerbase as a whole? I am about 1k rated myself and I generally like the pool. I think the rating brackets for the pool are a good solution to give lower rated players maps that are easier to play.
Polling lower rated people is really difficult because their community interaction is really low. Many don't even read the news. Only a server message to all boosted the poll result numbers significantly and I don't want to have everyone bothered by popups every month.
I'd also like to hear some examples of the "toxic/derogatory attitude/rhetoric", because the dictator FtX meme gets hinted at a lot, but so far nobody bothered to explain what egregious things he has apparently done. To me it seems that some people are disgruntled because he denied their proposed changes/maps/ideas. In my experience, everytime this happened was because the ideas or maps were not well thought out (i.e. had negative implications that the proposer didn't think of, or didn't even adress the root problem but merely a symptom), were of low quality or simply not feasible (hello low dev resources).