That's not the best example, but the chunk maps were supposed to attempt to account for the lag, so that if you started spamming a labeled button while ash was in that labeled chunk then it would ideally end up going through once it needed to and by then you'd have a new button to spam. Also it sort of admitted that there would always be people not following the plan, so a single line path was never going to happen in anarchy mode.
As for the voting, yeah, it's slower, and less silly, but we'd been in the game corner for over 24 hours now. A little bit of slow movement was worth it to get through that place. 20 seconds, I figure, is the absolute minimum. half a second wouldn't make it any better than anarchy mode, 20 seconds at least gives the needed input a chance over the leftover spam from the last input.
Yeah, it's a change in the experiment midway through, which is bad form, but I feel like it was a needed change. It's not as if there's a fail state with this game, at least not one we should easily reach. And running the experiment over and over again until you found out exactly what you could manage with what methods wouldn't be easy considering you're depending upon the will of a huge group to go along with you.