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To put in my ten cents.
I actually quite enjoyed the live judging aspect (And managed to be there for it in person, otherwise I would have gone to the stream) and I found the judges commentary interesting and in cases, revealing as to why an individual judge might have scored a particular image higher or lower than the others. Having received my feedback I am pretty pleased with it, and the image that came in for some (Relatively faint) criticism, I am not unhappy with either, the aspect that was noted as a negative had me umming and ahhing about entering it for some time before I pulled the trigger. Last I checked, entry to the Malins was not free but there is generally no feedback apart from the shortlist and that is live during the presentation.
I understand the judging format (Regardless of having "Live" final judging of the top images or not) to be quite common in photographic competition circles and it all seemed to work pretty smoothly to me.
Regards images being a bit too similar, I reckon it is a bit of a case of "Thems the breaks". They can't fairly push down an image as it is the 20th Trifid they have seen, or Dragons of Ara, Or M42, or in the case of this year, Rho Oph and it is worth noting that relatively "easy" or just plain popular targets feature heavily in the Malins over the years too as you would expect. But if you do a truly stunning Trifid or M42, shouldn't that be recognised?
Landscapes I reckon is a hard nut to crack. Unless you are truly fortunate with a setting, or catch a great auroral display, the obvious target is going to be the Milky way as a line or wide field loop, contrasted with suitably photogenic foreground objects. It has to be momentously hard to stand out from the crowd there.
There is certainly room on the calendar for both comps and formats, but I quite enjoyed the APP format, having attended both.
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