I'm new here, but I belong to a couple other forums where users are allowed to put a poll in their thread. I have not seen it get out of hand. The stupid polls generally get ignored so they end up low on the list, so people don't tend to generate useless ones.

The power of a poll is in its statistical capabilities which would actually add value to some threads--like the MPG thread, it could calculate statistics which are much more easily interpreted than trying read all the posts to get an impression of overall figures.

Just my two cents.