~anthropic/claude-sonnet-latest → A (6:4)

Side A performs a genuine architectural improvement: it introduces a batching settlement worker that decouples vote persistence/ranking computation from the request path, adds a cached-scores fast path (`ranked_items_cached`), and cleans out an entire unused demo-counter feature (code, events, tests) that was cluttering the codebase. Side B is a more narrowly scoped UI bugfix (slider/winner highlighting) with good test coverage, but it only affects presentation correctness rather than the core system design, making A's contribution more structurally significant and longer-lasting.