Via Tender: APIv3: Restore the "popularity" field on movie searches

Assigned to Tender discussion #482. As reported in Tender:

Hi there,
back in December I wrote a script to search TMDB by using APIv3. What the script basically do is a search for a movie (given the title as input parameter) and then sort the result by popularity. Today I've been back to it and I noticed that the script is broken since in the answer it gets the "popularity" field is not there anymore. I can understand that v3 is still in progress, but I'm a little disappointed since even your documentation still says that the "popularity" field should be part of the "Search Movies" answer.

What I've noticed though, is that there are now two new fields "vote_avarage" and "vote_count", but they are not documented, so even if it's quite easy to imagine to replace the missing "popularity" with the new "vote_count", is not still clear if the two can be considered the same or not. Digging into your KB pages didn't give me any hint about this issue.

Could please explain what happened to the "popularity" field and what the new "vote_*" fields are for? Are the latter here to stay, or are something I should not rely on?

Thanks,
Andrea