I think it's fair to say that the Hugos are a beauty contest.

The "beauty" being judged is a notion of quality, "best", but it's a very squishy and amorphous and to go back to a dice analogy would involve dice where the participants can't agree on how to read them or what numbering system is involved.

So while I agree that there's no reasonable statistical inference -- things are emphatically clustered -- I'm not sure there's even an agreement on the standards of quality. The component that's "how did I feel when I read this?" isn't small, and it can't be abstracted very well.

Which is a long way to say I think the Puppies are plain old authoritarians, angry at not getting to force people to be normal.