It's a competition to entertainingly find a best candidate. The core mechanic was the elimination round. Anyone who could consistently beat others given a rando

It's a competition to entertainingly find a best candidate. The core mechanic was the elimination round. Anyone who could consistently beat others given a random topic and limited time was likely to win regardless of what happened in the leading-up rounds. Looking at the strips after the fact, Abby and Katie pretty obviously are writing the best strips. And sure, Abby's is the better of the two, but her concept is harder to distill down to its essence and present - Katie was the only one of the three finalists who was able to competently and interestingly introduce her new strip with just a few sample pages. If you think they picked wrong, who should have won instead? (Note that several of the other cartoonists have been hired by Penny Arcade for other tasks such as doing The Trenches and designing pins. So even if you ignore the publicity aspect there were still multiple winners.)