I appreciate your commitment to objectivity.
To me, all these polls and straw polls seem like a way for the cable channels to fill time during a notoriously slow news time. They are less than useless to realists.
I agree with half, maybe two/thirds of what you say about the straw polls. They are news filler and they can be criticized fairly as extremely small samples.
Now for the slight nuanced disagreement:
I submit a couple of things make them more significant that useless: For instance, the Florida Straw poll was a correct predictor of every single GOP nominee starting with Reagan’s first successful run. And then there’s the idea that simply because the news channels do hype them, they grow into something more significant than perhaps they should be.
One week, or six weeks from now, the Florida poll might be doing Cain no more good than the Iowa straw poll did Bachmann. OR, it might a game changer.