I agree on that, polls about the direction of a project must be considered very carefully for many reasons, including this one. Same goes for crowdfunding stretch goals by the way.

Good point on the obsolescence of the device and the kernel. Since we're probably not going to see such projects very often (even though Chen spoke of the Lauta revival as only the beginning of something on the longer term), I would definitely prefer something long-lived. That, and community ports (either for Sailfish, although again I'd prefer having Aliendalvik included, or other OSes as well) take time, especially with limited ressources and contributors. So many good software/OS projects die before completion just because the target hardware ends up being considered too outdated for people to be interested (even though the hardware is still plenty enough for the said projects), leading to less contributors and slow death of development.