This was really starting to bother me, especially after the comments, I saw from @soyrosa and I don't really blame her either. There's so many using the ocd and gems communities in the hope of a vote that people don't want to use any of the others.
So this has come at a good time for me, and I'm glad you are doing this or the community aspect was going to break.
I hope gems can do something similar. As for the participating communities, I will contact you about two that I would like to be added if possible.
I talked about Audience and not Rewards as the most important factor, but YES, they are clearly influencing how people are 'choosing' their communities. I hope this change is going to make a difference and more niche communities can 'apply' to bigger stakeholders like OCD/Appreciator/etc to spread the rewards across all of the awesome topics people enjoy talking about.