Neither of the two polls you posted give any indication of who participated in it, so I cannot evaluate whether they are representative of the Zcash community at all.
It’s nothing to do with whether ZcashCo would have accepted it, but whether the community would have accepted it. We cannot and would not stop anyone from running whatever code they choose to (it’s one of the reasons we are strongly against auto-upgrades of node software). All we can do is say whether or not we would develop on, and provide ongoing support for, a particular chain. So while yes, code written by another entity to implement an immediate fork away from ASICs would most likely still not have been included by ZcashCo in the Sapling upgrade (due to aforementioned security and testing concerns), it could still have been proposed to the community as its own upgrade.
There is the separate question of which chain would be called “Zcash” after this kind of competing upgrade, which is defined by the trademark holder. But that is getting wildly off-topic for this thread, and there are discussions about that elsewhere.
See the following links for information on how the Zcash Foundation (which is separate from the Zcash Company) processed applications, and the full list of participants (so you can judge for yourself how successful the Zcash Foundation was at their goal of obtaining a representative sample of the community).
The call for participants to sign up was posted about right here in the forum:
I appreciate your sentiments
Agreed. We need bettter ways to include more voices, and to figure out how to make such a process scale. There are some good Rust 2019 posts being made at the moment about similar scaling problems in decision-making within the Rust community, which I think could be very useful for us.
