Interesting poll.
My short answer to the question of who is the better player:
It's Jack Hughes in my opinion.
My long answer to the question is based on 3 parts.
1. Jack Hughes' career trajectory is and has been upwards throughout his career. We're talking about a 21-year old center who is widely considered as a top15 center in the league already, and one potentially able to reach the top5. Some people have shown here that aside from his rookie year, his offensive contribution is the same or better as MacKinnon had at the same stage of his career.
This has not been the case with Elias Pettersson. Pettersson's two first years in the league were absolutely amazing, but after that he hasn't been able to reach the same level. There's a plethora of reasons for this starting from covid and different injury challenges, but ultimately Pettersson's career trajectory is not looking similar. He's trending downwards from his rookie year. Sure, he's still relatively young too, being 24 at the season start, and can and probably will bounce back, which he partly did last year at the end of it. Still, before his injury Hughes was easily the top performer in New Jersey, meanwhile Pettersson, who is supposed to be Vancouver's clear cut 1C, ultimately ended up trailing by 30 points to their 2C.
2. Jack Hughes' two way game is pretty underrated actually. This was the best shown during 2020-21 season where he started to find his game in the league, as shown by the charts put under there, and 2021-22 when he took the step forward in terms of offensive contribution, by no means he turned bad defensively. Some people have claimed here Pettersson to contribute more defensively, but at least based on evolving-hockey's model this is not the correct take. Yes, VAN by choice have decided to use Pettersson as a penalty killer, but that doesn't automatically mean he's more adept in defending. It just means that they either don't have a better guy for the role, or that their PK is built in an aggressive way that could use having skilled guys in there. Whatever their thought process were, it hasn't really produced results, given that Vancouver's PK% of 77.1 was the fourth worst league-wide last year.
3. Quality of team mates. Hughes' immensely good production can also be put to a different light when we look at how the teams have managed. Vancouver has been a fringe playoff team pretty much throughout the time Pettersson has been a part of the team. New Jersey has been a bottom-5 team smack dab in the middle of a rebuild, and still Hughes puts up statistically better results. He also makes players around him better - Jesper Bratt has turned into a bonafide top-6 winger that could challenge to the top line in almost any team in the league. Sharangovich has turned to a solid 2nd line guy as well playing with the guy. Pettersson does play in a better team, and should he be considered better player he should get better results.
Overall, even though of the two I do prefer Hughes, there's nothing to take away from the fact that as a 23, soon to be 24 year old Pettersson has left a mark that is not easy to just ignore. Before the covid break all the things said earlier about Hughes could've easily been applied to Pettersson, other than him having a bad rookie year, because Pettersson's rookie year was absolutely stellar. Pettersson could be, and probably is, a franchise worthy player in his own right, and we have seen glimpses of this. Still, for the question of who I think is better right now, I would have to choose Jack Hughes.