Yes, the “votes” on ideas (+ accompanying qualitative feedback) are just inputs for your product team to see what users think would be most valuable. As you say, it would remain the prerogative of your product team to incorporate these inputs with other factors like strategic considerations, innovation (to the extent that some features are so groundbreaking, users won’t know to ask for them), effort estimates, dependencies etc. You’d have to set the right expectations with the community, but you might find it extremely valuable for prioritizing the right things to work on next. I imagine it's quite difficult for your product team to analyze/quantify the unstructured inputs they receive on the Feature Requests & Suggestions forum.