This is generally the problem with forum polls, most often caused by the original poster's own bias. It's not always intentional, but it's almost always there.I do see now that the poll questions could have been phrased better and as you said some pro-Steam people like yourself could have (correctly) voted a "Steam-neutral" vote as Steam didn't influence your decision to purchase Civ5.
The 'fanatics' are probably the worse sample you could use though, because of our very nature. We are the group of people who will be most demanding of the franchise, we will have the highest expectations and we will all have our own idea of what is or isn't a good move for the developer or publisher to make. But, we are definately not correct, in fact we are most likely to be wrong because of our own emotional attachment.That still tells us much. Of 629 votes on a Civ-friendly site in the Civ5 sub-forum 91 (14%) said "I will definitely NOT buy the game, because of Steam". One out of every seven potential buyers here on Civfanatics are so against Steam that they told us they will not purchase Civ5 because of it.
You did, but I trust the second poll even less. Again, I'll use myself as an example and look at the folowing poll option: Publishing (Steam, Deluxe edition, DLC)In my own defense I did include two polls in my original post:
For me, I dislike Deluxe/Special/Collectors editions and feel that publishers should release the entire game as the base product and save the 'special' editions for bundles later when they include expansions or other add-ons. I also dislike the basic concept of DLC and prefer larger expansions over multiple small DLC add-ons. Nothing else listed as an option annoys me at all. So if I were to answer that poll (I didn't) the thing that annoys me most would be the option you listed, however since it combined Steam, DLC and Deluxe Edition how would you know which of those were my reason for selecting it? Had I selected that option you would be incorrectly assuming that my reason for picking it was Steam when that is actually your reason. I can just as easily look at that and see a bunch of people that dislike the 'Deluxe Edition' as much as I do.
What you need is a very simple poll with two questions (two polls with the way this forum works which would complicate the results)-
Do you plan on buying Civ 5? [yes/no] and,
(If not buying Civ 5) Is your decision to not buy Civ 5 completely and solely due to the inclusion of Steam Works which makes installing and running the Steam client a requirement to play the game? [yes/no]
Then, if you wanted to remove any reasonable doubt you'd want to track those who said they would not buy and that Steam was the ONLY reason they wouldn't buy. But, if you take that step you're no longer simply polling people but instead pointing out how unreliable polls really are.