The dev team chose not to ask anybody at first...they came right out and said they were going to halve the coin. Parts of the community were outraged and they decided to have a poll.
In my opinion the halving strategy should have been thought out from the launch. The first thing I noticed about this coin after it launched...no halving or any mechanism to reduce block rewards over time. It seemed odd. When it came time to actually implementing something we all had different opinions on how to do it.
On the first point, the push for halving was made HEAVILY on reddit well before the poll. Which is why I screamed for it after the halving announcement. But you can go back and look at reddit and see how many people pushed for it before the poll. I seriously questioned these peoples' crypto knowledge then, and I still do now. You don't shout for change just because you think something will go "to da moonz".
I fully agree with the the first part of your second point, but there was a halving scheduled for POT. It's in the first post of this thread, as follows:
Information
PoW algorithm: Scrypt
Premine: first 55 blocks where mined for checkpoints
Retarget: 107 blocks
Starting difficulty: 0.000
Max supply: 420 million
Reward halving interval: 840k blocks (~4.20 years)
There was a halving in place. Why does everyone keep forgetting about that? It's in the github, the website, the ANN post... how can people miss that?
-Fuse