I agree
The plugin that would change the name of likes to upvotes and place them on the front-page was simply a quick and dirty fix and it would work to some extend since Discourse uses likes to rank top topics and what to include in digest mails.
What would be really awesome would be to have this implemented on the Feature Voting Plugin so you can vote on topics from the front-page and a custom view that shows trending/hot and top topics this week and some way to make the highest rated topics be included in the digest email