If a good survey was conducted and showed that a supermajority of Monks want, in general, such minor improvements to be made to old nodes, then you'd have a much better argument.

Good surveys are rather difficult to produce because it is much too easy to bias the results quite a bit based on minor changes in how you word the questions.

Even with a good, objective survey, I find an open debate much more compelling. It is too easy to click "Answer A" without really thinking through the issue. I'm much more persuaded by someone presenting why they would choose "Answer A" and with how others react to such declarations.

So (to take an extreme position which seems terribly unlikely) even if 90% of monks want "A" but 5% of monks want "B" and several of those 5% write eloquently about why "B" is a Good Thing while only a very few relatively poorly received replies try to refute any of their points or to defend "A" (some of which are eloquently refuted) and the "B" nodes even get quite a few more upvotes than "A" nodes (some of which get just a few downvotes)...

...then you could hire the world's best survey team and convince me that 90% of monks want "A" and I'm pretty sure I'd advocate "B".

I want to do what is best for the site, even if that isn't the most popular choice.

And voting on considerations is a quite bad form of survey. The consensus and policy is that having 2/3 of votes "for" a consideration is just not much support. Such a vote often means that there will be an outcry if the consideration action is implemented and yet will be less grumpling when the action is reversed.

I want to know what principles are well-regarded here and use them to guide action. And those easily beat a straw poll about a specific action, especially when the principle calls for not changing something.