I fear we may have gotten a bit spoiled if we are complaining about writeups getting "only" 20 votes right off the bat. Let's not forget that for most of E2's early history, an un-C!'d writeup was extremely lucky to get even *10* votes before falling off the New Writeups list (and I have tons of low-rep writeups to prove it). There was a golden era about halfway through E2's decline when there were still a good number of users but relatively few writeups, and after thresholds to get votes had been lowered, when a C!'d writeup could easily get 35 votes right off the bat. But in the longer history of E2, that was an anomaly, and the fact is that new writeups written today get significantly more votes than they would have in 2001 or 2002, at the height of E2's glory.
All that being said, I am all in favor of increasing votes and writeups, so I would completely support borgo's idea of some kind of monthly winners. It wouldn't be hard to write up some kind of superdoc that tracks XP, addiction, and devotion over the previous 30 days or somesuch, if somebody with coding chops has a bit of time.