Hacker News Reader

Is it really too much to ask from such a project to learn about its initiators and purpose in a first place directly from the site itself?

Well there was a lot of talk about this on the mailing list with a lot of core devs opposed to the idea.

I'm not on the mailing list / saw the survey first on HN. At first glance thought it was marketing spam or something.

So it clearly is a survey for people on the mailing list and others would just spoil the numbers :)

Why would a spammer be interested in hearing opinions about Emacs?

Idk, maybe it's Google obtaining market data in order to launch a cloud-based Gemacs

So they made it as shoddy looking as possible to be able to say later, well we did have a survey, but few participated?

No, it's not.