This is so impossible to respond to without naming names, so apologies, but I'll use an example from my own region. You may be selective about the panelists, but it's very unclear from the outside what the criteria are. "Zedreo" has been a panelist for multiple years and is apparently from Alberta. However, the only Melee tournament he's seemingly EVER entered on start gg was Self-Fights 1, a private Melee Stats online event. I've even asked multiple Alberta TOs and players about him and nobody has ever met the guy. This is not meant to be shade at him specifically- he may be a great balloter, I genuinely have no idea. And it's also not to say that you need to be an active player to be able to put together a good ranking. But when this is their sole connection to the scene it invites a lot of skepticism and doubt about their relationship to the Melee community and their understanding of the context of the data they're parsing, and I don't think it creates a lot of confidence in the final product when none of this is particularly transparent. It's already a bit of a conflict of interest that the balloters largely sit in the Melee Stats discord and casually come to rankings consensuses throughout the year prior to the balloting period, but it's especially concerning when people like Mario H or even Etossed, who have historically been clearly very passionate about results and rankings and who have submitted test ballots in the past, have been seemingly thrown out for not closely mirroring that consensus opinion. It makes people wonder whether the balloting system is promoting accuracy, or the echoing of those consensus MS opinions. I think that, at the very least, being more transparent about the ways that someone can become a balloter and what their responsibilities actually entail would be a great step in communicating that the rankings are a product of the efforts of people who are currently passionate and knowledgeable about the scene. Balloters who haven't been in or around the scene for several years but who still have a ballot, while actively passionate people who are not in the Melee Stats social circles are seemingly excluded, reinforce the outside impression that the rankings are a representation of the community through a Melee Stats community lens rather than a reflection of the Melee community as a whole. I know the original tweet is now deleted, and not to speak on their behalf, but I think this is to the point that they were trying to make. The point isn't that you let "anyone" be a balloter, it's that the criteria for having a ballot are unclear, and seems to value being a part of Melee Stats more than part of Melee.