Origins Awards: are they broken, should we fix?

Ryan Dancey has floated a very specific set of proposals to change the voting process for the Origins Awards, and they’re eliciting unusually active discussion on GamingReport. I like the vote-count suggestions, but if the goal is to make the awards less of a flavor-of-the-month popularity contest, why eliminate “outdated” categories like historical miniatures, thus assuring they get nothing?