Fiona Patten not preferencing the Socialists had nothing to do with her result.
What she didn't do was to go with all the other minor parties and their deals, the Socialists weren't involved in that either.
What happened was that the minor parties got in by cross preferencing and what really got them over the line was that Labor and the Greens were preferencing minor parties before each other. In my upper house region the Greens got about 0.75 of a quota and were beaten for the last spot by a candidate with a fraction of their vote - why? Because the Greens got no preferences so never got to a quota.
What I also noticed this election is that, if you add up the votes of Labor, Libs and Greens in my region you get over 5 quotas (5 to be elected in each region in the Victorian upper house), yet 4 seats came from these votes because nothing went to the Greens. This is problematic.
In contrast, when all the wailing was going on about the Senate preferences at one recent election (the last election? can't remember), you add up Labor, Libs and Greens in some states (I think Vic but a while ago so can't remember) and you got just under 5 quotas (6 to be elected in a half Senate election) which is when I just think we're being bullsh!tted, because clearly they did not deserve to get all 6 seats between them. One minor party should get a seat in that scenario. Unfortunately, since most people don't have the time or inclination to understand proportional rep voting they get away with misleading commentary.
That said, being able to direct preferences above the line makes a lot of sense, I will be surprised if this isn't introduced in Victoria before the next election.
As for Joe above, yep, making your seat marginal has a lot of upside if you can do it - safe seats get ignored. I live in a safe seat and my daughter's high school had older class rooms than the school I went to decades earlier. It took a campaign which deliberately used parents from a nearby marginal seat to get anything.
DS