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It's not about open vs closed systems. The issue is that not only do neither of us know whether my love of something is greater than your hatred, it's a meaningless comparison. There are no units for such a comparison. What we have units for is the proxy to that of how much we're willing to pay to express our feelings.
We also don't know (and can't know) how well my vs your feelings map onto other people. If one in ten people love the same thing I do but four in ten marginally like the same thing you do, there's no non-arbitrary reason why the thing I love should be less visible than the thing you like. If it's more visible, then we're stacking the deck towards surfacing things that will be valued highly, if only by a few people, and if it's less visible, then we're stacking the deck towards things that will be mildly appreciated by many people. There's no right answer here.
Balancing intensity of feelings towards something against the consensus of feelings (I wish I had better terms for this) requires making arbitrary assumptions about how different people's feelings compare to each other. Giving everything the same weight (just counting sats) makes the fewest unknowable assumptions (sort of... or it's just as arbitrary. This is something econometricians argue about though.).
Question to this, as currently the only metric is sats spent, so we have this system of the fewest unknowable assumptions: do you think that the front page for say the past month, on average, was more valuable as a recommendation system than it was one year ago over the same month?
I'm asking because I think that if we want to measure what gets zapped the most, then measuring what gets zapped is per definition the best metric. And from a holistic p.o.v. this makes total sense. But from a usefulness perspective for the stackers that come and spend their sats here, as in head count not sat count, do we really think that sum(sats) is an actual good metric for quality content?
My cop out answer is that we don't know because we haven't approached the equilibrium of the current system yet, nor have we seen all the wallet-postponed improvements.
My straight answer is that I think Stacker News was in a better place in the past, but I'm not sure how much to attribute that to the ranking algo.
Agnostic to what though? In a closed-loop system I think that I'd agree with you, but the zaps are open loop, meaning that the agnosticism is to everything but external wealth? I.e. there is no measure of what is popular content, there is only a measure of how much externally acquired sats are put towards the promotion of the post.
Great for advertisements, terrible for a community.