I'm glad to see the numbers released. Especially in light of claims from around the collecting community that there was some measure of manipulation of the poll by hacking or some other dubious influence.
I do have mixed feelings about the characters who were left on the list that were set to be produced. The only reasonable thing that I can come up with is this: the characters who were set to be produced had probably not been finalized by the time that ToyFare went to press with the Top 25.
From talking with people at Hasbro at various cons, it seems that some things in their line can change due to varying curcumstances. Then factor in ToyFare's print deadlines and their own constraints in preparing for the poll. I think that may account for why four candidates (Vos, Mara Jade, Clone Commander aka Galactic Marine and Kir Kanos) were left on the ballot.
Plus, I think you've got to account for Hasbro being in something of a precarious situation with ToyFare. They may not want to leak info about figures that are in the pipeline to ToyFare because it may be tantamount to an official announcement. So hypothetically, say Hasbro tells ToyFare in March that "Oh, you can eliminate the Clone Commander/Galactic Marine from the poll since we have him slated for next January". But then what if something happens and the Galactic Marine gets pushed back? Say there's a problem with the tooling and they're going to eliminate the figure from that wave and put it in a Battle Pack in Q3 of '07. It seems like Hasbro likes to have all of their ducks in a row business wise before they make these kinds of announcements, and that could have been at play in this instance. Lord knows that while they've got a loyal customer base, that clientele is equally critical, so I can appreciate some caution on Hasbro's part.
As for the KOTOR figures making a strong showing? I'm not really surprised. I knew that the video game industry was huge. So I did a little searching around the 'net and found
THIS ARTICLE. It's a report on the earnings of the 2nd biggest video game publisher in the US, Activision. Their projected earnings for the current fiscal year? $1.1 billion. And that's just one company. EA, another of the major game producers had quarterly earnings of nearly $200 million. These are just the game producers, and not the companies that are making the hardware. But the numbers themselves are truly staggering, and with that in mind it gives me a better understanding of why the KOTOR characters polled as well as they did. The video game industry is just a monster!