> They can do that - but the game theory around "don't rate the candidate you don't want ..." stuff is way too complicated.

I'm not understanding your point. In cardinal systems a non rating is equivalent to a rating of zero. Just like in ordinal systems a non ranking is equivalent to ranking last place.

> And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes, Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain exactly what is going on

This makes it seem like you're in favor of cardinal methods actually. Tallying their votes is pretty trivial. You sum the scores of all candidates and then argmax the totals. I don't think people have a hard time understanding this. It is essentially the same as what happens with FPTP! I mean this is objectively a simpler algorithm than those used by even the simplest ordinal methods.