If someone is a famous designer/quilter and has a website and publishing patterns and books, making money from it,etc., why do they need the extra adulation of winning a prize? To me it reminds me of when they let professionals in the Olympics. The pros get paid millions of dollars, let the amateurs have the glory of winning the Olympics.
As far as more than one person working on the quilt, I used to hand quilt for a published designer/quiltmaker and I noticed when the books came out some of the captions would be, "pieced by Jane Smith" (not the author), "hand quilted by Barb" - so all the author did was design it. Not sure how I would feel about that if a quilt like that was entered in a show (as far as I know they weren't).