The phrase Hayashi apparently used was something like "There's no reason to think that there will only be female characters."
I believe that was also a mistranslation, which a number of sites have since corrected. Rather than saying "don't think it will all be female characters," he meant something closer to "don't think it will
have all the female characters," in reference to the 9-character voting they have going on.
Pay to Vote is definitely a new thing.
Who knows the next presidential election will follow this. TN should patent the concept.
"Pay2Vote. Because Fuck You, We Want Your Money."
Well, to be fair, it does cut down on spamming and rigged votes. It's harder to cheat the PSN system than a freely-open-to-all system on a website.
If nothing else, it should give more accurate popularity results, which was the whole point. Sure, some people will buy them all, but since these themes do cost real money (and they're not that great to begin with), most people are just going to cherry-pick their favorites, which is exactly the data TN wants to collect from this.