Votes are a transaction that has an RC price as are post/comments and wallet transfers and so on.
Yes they are related.
HOW they will replenish and how many votes and comments per cycle of recharge you can make have direct correlation to stake weight.
It remains poorly documented and to some degree unarticulated as to how "fast is recharge/replenish" and how "many per charge" of a thing a user will have - today for example we know what voting power is in relation to bandwidth and can say to some degree you will use 100% over 10 votes a 24 hour cycle at 100% each, with the slider enabling some throttling of your utilization as it works now, to enable using your 100% " vote bandwidth "fuel" at a better mpg so to speak, as a metaphor.
We just don't seem to have clear path to what this will mean after the HF.
Is that good news? No it should be made clear to users in plain and certain terms.
Has it been? No, because everyone who should be able to tell us, seems to at best be guessing and at worst not providing info at all.
Further, the interfaces we eventually developed to show voting power percentages on various front ends and tools sites won't work with this anymore, without repairs and changes to their code. So it's going to be "surprise surprise surprise" for a few days to weeks while "things balance" which is doublespeak in code, for we'll tell you once we figure it out after people start using it and it plays itself out.
As you aptly surmised in the post this question originated from, @bashadow , "We will see what will be."
And that's why many are expressing concern on this page about pushing out so many changes at once, and not even being able to explain them by the people who invented them.
Thanks, now we play the waiting game. I kind of feel sorry for the front end people, I really like @stemchillers vote gauge, gonna be sad to see it maybe not work. He will get one up I am sure that will work fine again I am sure.
On the plus side, maybe some big votes when the sliders don't work like they used to. ;-}
It's going to be quite a show for a few hours/days/weeks/months?