I think you're right. It was probably a good bootstrapping strategy at the start to get good designs into the system and also some marketing benefits from prom

I think you're right. It was probably a good bootstrapping strategy at the start to get good designs into the system and also some marketing benefits from promoting top designs from contests. The more I think about it, contest-driven marketing is likely not sustainable - contests are more of a novelty and very hard to keep fresh.