What's this about a 'test run', is there another actual vote?

There was a pre-registration that was supposed to provide advance warning of the upcoming vote, and then only the preregistered voters would count at this stage.

The preregistration resulted in only a small number of accounts registering, so they working group decided that the actual vote should be opened to everyone. I called the preregistration a 'test run' and the actual vote is happening now (the dpoll link at the top of this post).

I'm really struggling with stake mattering more than people

It's not that stake matters more than people. Stake-based consensus is a protocol-level solution to the byzantine generals problem (an attack vector that any trustless protocol must have a good answer for in order to be considered 'secure' and 'immutable'). The idea of stake as a consensus solution is that anyone with enough stake to influence the consensus will have more to gain from upholding the blockchain than they could potentially gain from sabotage. While less important when the consensus mechanism is a step removed (political discussion in an open forum, with decisions being reversible instead of immutable), it's still the backbone of over 100 years of shareholder rights law (1 share = 1 vote).
It's not a perfect system, but it provides a lot more resilience in a decentralized world than can be achieved with a 'permissioned' protocol. Counting people instead of stake requires 'oracles' to verify that each account has a unique pulse behind it; essentially making a permissioned blockchain instead of a truly decentralized blockchain. As seen with EOS, permissioned blockchains are terrible about maintaining immutability.

may as well reflect the underlying truth of the platform's economics.

All potential technical solutions are subject to constraints, and the pros/cons depend on the actual objectives to be attained - what problem is this protocol actually trying to solve? One of struggles with Steem is that there are different perspectives on the actual objective, with key stakeholder groups unable to come to terms on what the purpose of Steem is.
If the objective is different than what is coded into the protocol, then it has to be solved at protocol-level, which requires establishing a new consensus among the top witnesses.