The OSRS has spoken up:
"Summits are an exciting time, packed with cool upcoming content. Naturally, Summit polls have a lot more visibility, and this lets us get a more representative result from the community.
Our new polling system lets us greenlight multiple projects at once, so that our development teams can get to work much earlier. This also gives them plenty of time to get players involved in the design process, which makes a big difference.
As for why Sailing appeared in the middle of the poll – we’d already talked a lot about Sailing in the run-up to the Summer Summit, so we wanted to give Varlamore, our surprise reveal, the spotlight. Varlamore also had a few separate components to poll, so we felt it was better to group them all together."
What we have learned is OSRS wanted to poll Sailing with all the other Summer Summit proposals because of "visibility". This coincides with my observation (Page 1, Post 8) on the dwindling interests in Sailing. If they polled Sailing separately, far more than likely we would only see a pretty low participation rate on the voting booth (maybe near the 100k mark compared to over 190k when it started out?)
Another interesting thing we have learned is Sailing passed only because of the spike up on Yes vote in the last day. From the graph Hourly Voting graph they showed us, seemingly Sailing would have failed if the Poll ended less than 24 hours earlier:
https://cdn.runescape.com/assets/img/external/oldschool/2023/newsposts/2023-08-31/Hour.png#