Several friends and I have been working through the Hugo nominations, and one of the first to come off the library hold list was Scales. Woof, not hard to see why it wasn't difficult to get vs some of the other titles. It was a workmanlike assembly of lots and lots of heavily stereotyped/one-dimensional characters thinly veneered onto a grab bag plot on rails. Also, it had a gay dino fucking relationship, and a human/dino fucking relationship that were described in entirely PG terms/occured completely in ellipsis. Zero points for titillation or artistic execution. I understand the author had some successful books about 35 years ago, though I never heard of them.
TL;DR - How does a book like this make it onto the Hugo noms? Having briefly read some of the vote weighting, did a bunch of people tip it as the only novel on their ballot? Was this some kind of coordinated campaign like the Sad Puppies thing a few years ago?