If it's the former, then I am very happy to see there was not strong support to changing the current naming scheme mid-alphabet. I believe that would have been confusing (or just out right odd) to our end users.
Yes, this was driven by the lack of people willing to commit to running the poll, and people who had issues with how the TC ran the last one.
Personally, I don't see a huge issue with it, (barring the issue with potentially not having a venue city to choose from for one of the 2020 and one 2021 release).
FWIW, I do think that was a little of an exceptional circumstance that can easily be addressed by writing down a process for when we need to make sure to get specific steps done in order to be ready in time. And have safeguards in place for someone else to step in if the current person leading it gets pulled away by outside factors.
The U lettering aligning with China was just an unfortunate circumstance.
But I think there's also another question that is not asked/answered by this poll. Assuming we keep with the naming scheme, that doesn't mean we need to choose those names in the same fashion we have been doing it. I'd propose we just get a collection of place names that have some kind (any kind) of meaning to folks in the community, all the way through Z. Then for each cycle, let the community vote on which names for the given letter they prefer.
Even if we don't change though, I'm a little optimistic that we won't have as much trouble picking potential names like we did trying to map U to Chinese names.
Anyway, my 2 yuan.
Sean