John,
First and foremost, thanks for the clarity on the lifecycle of an idea, and what's required to get it into review. This clears things up for me in many ways, so it's appreciated.
With respect to vote counts, I agree - 10 is rather anaemic, but it's a reasonable proportion of those that appear to visit and comment on the community on a regular basis, rather than just those registered. Getting this number up would be fantastic, but I think will take a concerted effort by both CA and the active members to encourage those who are a part of the community to participate, both those registered and those developers in the wild. How specifically to achieve this, I'm not sure, but I think the increasing feedback on ideas, and reduced time to answer, will hopefully go a ways to improving the usefulness. Perhaps more day to day useful content for developers would help attract as well, to give them a reason to come back. I would also expect while there's 500 here, there's probably 2-3x as many who aren't even registered.
With respect to vote value, I think you'd struggle to even get 10 votes right now, if you restricted it back to a single vote per company. While I certainly appreciate you don't want the development of Gen to be skewed by a single powerful voting block, at least as evidenced in the community's interactions so far, there doesn't appear to be that occurring when you take into account the regular voters. There's the technical challenge as well (do you even have the capability with the current community software to restrict such voting?), but I would honestly take an optimistic view in regards to voting, and attempt to deal with it when or if it arises. Even then, you could consider weighting the votes from a single company, rather than immediately restricting it back to 1 per company. It's a tough one - should a small company of 3 developers who are primarily in application maintenance mode have the same voting power as a larger company of 20 who are active and wanting to push Gen forward into newer arenas? Dwarfed obviously the moment one with 100+ weighs in. It's a tough one to answer, and I don't think there's a simple solution. And I don't think you need a site ID to register and participate, so if one is sufficiently nefarious, they could hide behind anonymous registrations.
I'd suggest taking the feedback and votes you're getting now, as is, while trying to get the overall numbers up at which point you might reconsider voting values. You probably don't want to isolate those already prepared to vote, even if from the same company.