It is not always about following the rules or not giving your best or being good but there's a huge variety of entries which you can see yourself if you read them all.

How to improve? By practising and finding your style which I believe you start showing.

Since we have 6 prizes (UVF included) In this case we decided to let clear freewriting and show the niche being among the winners. There were some entries with the same amount of points where we had to make a choice based on these aspects and I agree that it doesn't always feel good to make this decision since the one who only freewrites since years is left out.