1) He wants to see if a popular, vetted, and meaningful delegate can get elected by the community. Basically if toast can't the rest of us won't either.
I suspect that is the reason. It is pretty disappointing though to see that even after more than a week has passed, someone like toast has still yet to get into the top 101.
I would like to how many of the current top 101 delegates bytemaster is voting for and what percentage of the approval his votes account for. I would make an educated guess that nearly all of the active delegates (if not all) are voted for by stake controlled by bytemaster and that he accounts for at least 7% of the approval percentages. If that is true, that would mean there is only approximately 3-5% of other stake that is voting for the top 10 active delegates. And that alone is not enough to get a delegate into the top 101.
If my estimates are true, then that means that if bytemaster continues to follow the policy of not voting for 100% delegates in order to be neutral, then we will not be able to vote in these paid delegates unless we get people who currently don't bother voting to start voting.
About 45% of stake remains unclaimed so far for some reason (although I think this includes the 20% vested stake that no one can claim yet?). Another at least 12.12% have at a minimum learned how to use the voting mechanics. What is the excuse for the other 43% of stake? My hope is that this is stake that was claimed, moved into cold storage and not touched since then. If that is the case, then I am hopeful that voter apathy will significantly drop once we are able to decouple voting private keys from spending private keys.