This strikes me as the kind of thing that engineers might be kept in the dark about, but some PR agency somewhere may have outsourced something like this and done so in a way as to provide plausible deniability. A quick googling shows this wouldn't be the first time MS has resorted to astroturfing [1].
So while I don't doubt the sincerity of how you or any of your immediate coworkers/HN reader peers tend to behave, I think the facts speak a bit more clearly to the possibility of other parts of the MS organism being willing to do this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Again, there could certainly be degrees of separation, and as you accurately state I can't in any way speak on that. My main goal was just to speak to the best intentions and actions of the peers I've had the opportunity and privilege to work with.
Was in a similar boat as you, until a new build more or less forced me to use 10 (motherboard only had USB 3. yes, you can slipstream drivers into a 7 installer - but when I tried this, the machine kept bluescreening to high heck). After a few months, I'm perfectly fine with it.
Don't get me wrong, there are problems - but there have always been problems. The two competing but not quite feature matching control panels for example. I also turned notifications completely off, as they were all for trivial BS (in my case).
But overall, I am now just as happy as I was on 7.
Simply put, the sort of behavior implied (vote brigading) doesn't mesh with my understanding of how I or any of my coworker/HN reader peers tend to behave. I could be totally off the mark with this but it just doesn't mesh with the culture I've been exposed to.
More relevantly however, and more in line with how I typically approach HN threads regardless of topic, let me try and pose a more "occams razor" explanation:
MS has been gaining a lot of positive press lately. The tech community WANTS to see our biggest entities succeed and "do good". We hate seeing suggestions that a "new convert" to the good side might have changed face again. Realizing that a company can do both good and "evil" simultaneously is a degree of mental dissonance I don't often see handled "cleanly" so to say.
Long and the short; I am not happy with the forced upgrades. I am still using 7, and would be rather irked if they broke everything for the sake of forcing through content I do not want. However, I do tend to attribute much more naïve explanations for the patterns we're seeing, over some sort of PR conspiracy. There was a wonderful quote a while back, "we're not organized enough to be that evil" :) I don't mean to be any sort of MS apologist in this, my comment is entirely directed at the discussion regarding some degree of astroturfing, if I got asked about my opinions on the updates, well, that's a whole can of worms on its own and the remaining comments in the thread seem to speak to the resounding sentiment in that respect.