There has been a proposal for not using replies for voting.
This is cleaner and doesn't expose everyone's votes to anyone reading the thread.
I have a notion of how this would look, so I'm creating this discussion and the replies for each option as an example. Please discuss or upvote any of the options I wrote below, and we can all see how this would look.
Personally I can't think of how voting can be done cleanly within just Lemmy yet. It seems like there should be a special type of post developed for it.
I see a couple issues with your proposal. Actual discussion can either drown out the options to be voted, especially the ones that are being downvoted. Second, the snowball effect would be even worse than comment-based voting, as the earliest upvoted options would be on the top of the thread.
I agree that order shouldn't matter, but I strongly believe it would matter given the fact that everyone knows that upvoted posts appear at the top by default. The proposal doesn't address downvoting, but it will happen anyway and affect the outcome because of the ordering issue. Discussions will happen inside the voting thread even if it shouldn't happen, as well.