It's always interesting to see these debates. Every once in awhile this prompts me to do a stats dig.
IMO, overall the average vote given has increased slightly over the years, especially the past few. Also the voting range has narrowed where more people are voting in a limited range of 5 to 7 rather than using the full 1-10 scale.
Regarding the vote increase; using the Challenges/History page (visible to all) I took the last 60 challenges and grouped the top scores by counting how many were 5+, 6+, 7+, or 8+. Then I did the same going back in 5 year intervals (pulling a similar date range for 60 challenges). So, 2025, 2020, and 2015.
Here's the results ==> 
It's interesting how the top scores have fallen out of the 6+ zone and increased in the 7+. To me that doesn't suggest a negative voting trend. Yes, the last day of voting is still predictably lower, but over time has been trending up.
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Another study I did a couple months ago was related to the number of votes cast for each number on the 1-10 scale. I looked at voting patterns for DPChallenge for three short windows (10 challenges) in June 2003, June 2014, and current 2025.
As SC, we can see some challenge summaries, one of which is a total number of votes for each numeric vote (i.e # of 10's, 9's ... etc.).
I entered these values into a spreadsheet, summed the number of votes per challenge, and the number of votes per numeric category (10,9,8,7...) to then get a percentage representation for each.
If you look at the stats, the level of votes in the 1 to 3 range were much more common in the early days of DPChallenge. Now we're slightly heavier in the voting range of 6 thru 9.
The results of that study ==> 
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