OPINION: The Facebook competition that wasn't

Check out the image posted on Ministry of National Diversity and Social Integration

Been actively trying to stay off  "the facebook" for the past couple of weeks but seeing this brought me out of my little self imposed hiatus. A friend of mine posted the above illustrations done for a crowd-sourced mascot competition put together by the Ministry of National Diversity and Social Integration.

While the entries themselves are interesting ;to say the least; what stuck me was the fact that, they all had a very similar style and structure, which lead me to think that at first this was all sent in by one designer. So i checked out the Facebook page looking for more entries only to realize that this was the only entry and that these designs were the best of the lot.

Now to the untrained eye, they are good designs, but to the professional, you'd know that even though they say that they are from different entrants/ artists, they were all designed by the same artist.

Which leads me to make this assumption

The original entrants had to have had some potential to be chosen, but under the great wisdom of whoever is in control of this competition decided that they were't good enough for public consumption and then had an illustrator redesign them. 

Which begs the question of how the entered artists must feel, entering a competition then being told well you're designs are good, just not good enough for us to show the public.

And while maybe for all intents and purposes for the competition, they wanted each entry to have a uniform quality about them, so that the public judging by "likes" on Facebook can have something pretty to look at (because we all know that can't be rigged). I'm left to wonder if it takes away the point of having a competition of this nature in the first place if you are just going to re-design them at the last minute?