I did read once somewhere that judges have a list of set criteria, and they will award considerable weight to something we may not have even considered.
Tell you the quilt that puzzled me. It was for a specific competition, there were six quilts and five prizes. (Two quilts were "withdrawn", which I reckon is due to one shop selling the wrong fabrics for this competition.) It used the challenge fabrics all right, but the design was not original. It was a copy of The Great Wave of Kanagawa. Nicely pieced, mind, but the quilting was nowhere near sufficient. There was a large cream area to the top right of the quilt, above the wave, which was left almost entirely unquilted (this was a 39" square quilt), and even in a thumbnail photo you could see the fabric hanging loosely there. I think it won either third prize or was one of the two runners up. A lovely quilt of a peacock in front of the Taj Mahal, original in design as far as I could tell, didn't win anything.