The relative quantity of votes a node recieves is determined primarily by whether or not its thread appears on the front page (The Monastery Gates). If a node is in a front-paged thread, it gets lots of votes -- potentially hundreds (whatever their polarity); if not, it will rarely show up anywhere in Best Nodes (or Worst Nodes) -- and of course, those two special pages will tend to amplify the nodes that get there, which in turn amplifies the difference between front-page and non-front-page threads.

Of course, there's a circularity here: people decide to front-page a thread because they think it's really good, and so it gets a lot more votes, which reinforce that view. So maybe what would work best, in addition to (or instead of) the "Best Nodes" page is simply a way to locate the threads that used to be on the front page, but have since been pushed off. The only problem then is to figure out how to find the nodes that deserved to go to the front page, but didn't (just because no one decided to do that).

Normalizing the vote rankings of nodes according to whether or not their threads are front-paged, as well as other factors mentioned above, could have a positive effect on the perceived "acuity" of the rankings -- but this would be hard to verify (there's no accounting for taste...); it might also have a noticeable negative effect on server performance, and this could probably be proven beyond doubt.