Debian Soap Opera vote simulator

Hmmm. Somebody should make a "Debian Soap Opera vote simulator" to make it easier to work this stuff out. So, what we "ought" to have if people behaved sincerely is:

ABCDE x 4
BACDE x 4

which would clearly be a draw (pending charmain's casting vote) under any sensible voting system, there is no clear preference expressed.

With the hypothesised Ian "spoiler" vote, you get

ABCDE x 4
BACDE x 3
BCDEA x 1

So, matrix time:

x mA mB mC mD mE how many prefer nY to mX
nA . 4 7 7 7
nB 4 . 8 8 8
nC 1 0 . 8 8
nD 1 0 0 . 8
nE 1 0 0 0 .

As we expected there is no Condorcet winner.

Now we use the Schulze method, finding "strongest paths", which are paths following voter preferences ranked by their weakest link, and that should resolve things, but I struggle with the descriptions I've found and can't say for sure what they tell us, particularly about A and B which we care most about here. My best attempt is:

x mA mB mC mD mE strongest path from mX to nY
nA . 4 7 7 7
nB 4 . 8 8 8
nC 1 1 . 8 8
nD 1 1 1 . 8
nE 1 1 1 1 .

So I think what happens is that Ian's "burying" (the scheme of insincerely ranking a strong candidate as weak) just inflates the weakest possible path and achieves nothing. The overall outcome is still a tie. But I am not entirely sure. The original paper by Schulze talks about eliminating paths that are used symmetrically, but if I do that options A and B both lose, which seems unexpected. A simulation (preferably using the same software Debian runs for an actual vote) would be useful.

FWIW This problem (usually on a less acute scale) is why you can't/ shouldn't deploy something like this for a real political election. It is vital to the actual purpose of democracy that everybody understands how voting works and believes voting determines the outcome. If the system is too complicated very few voters will have confidence in it, without that confidence nothing of value has been achieved.