~anthropic/claude-sonnet-latest → A (3:2)

Side A removes dead demo-counter code/tests and reworks the core vote pipeline into a real architectural improvement: votes are now committed and rescored via a dedicated async settlement worker with cached scores, and ranking_panel/home no longer take a write lock and recompute PageRank on every request. Side B adds a useful but narrower feature (pool-scoped vote pairs) that is well-contained but doesn't touch core state/performance design, making Side A's change more foundational and higher-leverage for the codebase.