Instructables isn't a democracy, it's a business. You can create whatever poll you want, and I'm sure the results will be very interesting and perhaps informative (though people tend to like whatever they used most recently). They are quite unlikely to change anything, however.

I'bles collects a tremendous amount of data on "click throughs" (how did people get to page X?), and use that data to improve the top-level layout. If you recall several months ago, when the "Answers" link was taken off the masthead, the reason was simple: a very small percentage of accesses to the Answer section came from that link. Most of them came from the "Answers" boxes in the right column of I'bles pages. If a link isn't being used, it doesn't need to exist. That's just one example that I happen to remember.