I understand where you're coming from and agree the decision has likely been already made to not change the law here and all this consultation has just been set up to support what they wanted to do anyway.
That said as I said above my main issue is that I basically don't trust anyone in the civil service and that this process, which superficially looks slack with no meaningful checks and balances, could very easily be openly abused by government itself to drive state agendas by allowing the creation of false opinion (anyone can set up a false account even if they were a department employee) that is then used to drive government legislative changes. There seem to be no obvious checks and controls to validate that people who respond even live here that are visible (some I hope exist behind the scenes). To vote you have to be on the electoral roll, have your address verified (by a letter sent to your home address which is then returned), and often have to produce ID to prove who you are when you vote. With consultations you can basically create a false email account, find any Manx post code to use on Google, and then submit a full consultation response on the government website under any name you want. Even if you work for the Department concerned. It's just plain wrong to say that it's an authoritative benchmark of the Manx publics views at all.