This may sound whiny, and I have nothing against long arm quilters (personally or that the option exists), so I apologize if this strikes someone the wrong way.
I went to a local show, and probably 80% of the quilts there were quilted by one particular longarmer (I know, because they credited her). The work was beautiful, don't get me wrong. But I felt like it gave an unfair advantage to some of the quilts that were actually quite plain otherwise. It seems like the person with either enough money to own a longarm or enough money to hire out all their quilting has an advantage at shows over the person who quilts their own on their machine (which I do, but I'm just not good enough yet to compete with professionals) or handquilts (because so few have the time to quilt as densely as a longarmer can. And it seems like who has the "best quilt" as determined by placing in the show shouldn't depend on who has more money.
I guess I feel like the fair thing to do would be to have separate categories for quilts that are hand quilted, home machine quilted, and hired out. Maybe some shows do that. I've really only been to the one.