The idea for the original one was mine and the interest it generated was amazing, the whole thing just seemed to slowly fizzle out with the subsequent challenges.
That's not at all what I saw. What I saw was a souring of the idea not on the part of the makers but through the amount of BS they endure that was generated by incompetent reviewers.
The first ever reviewer did the best job of them all. I'm not saying I completely endorse the way he went about it, but he was meticulous in his attention to the workmanship and wasn't shy with his criticism. To their credit, the makers did not baulk at that and came back for more.
Some of the subsequent trials have demonstrated a lack of commitment or understanding of the topic on the part of the reviewers. For example, I can vividly recall a collective review during which one of the reviews failed to submit his report for weeks on end. Then, even when his scoring was eventually submitted, it transpired that he and a co-reviewer had scored some characteristic on completely different criteria. In common parlance I think that's known as a nause-up.
Still, the makers seemed to like the experience / publicity of it and came back for more. Even when the Beckerheads had a go at the testing, and there was a bit of a clash of Beckerhead use vs uber-competitive-want-to-submit-the-best-cutter-of-the-cuttingy-things and some makers pushed the envelope a bit to far as to how thin an edge can be, leading to some pretty grim failures, they all took it like gentlemen. And once again they came back for more. Why after some of them had their work exposed to breakage in the glare of the public spotlight would they be willing to do that then and not now? I suspect because they were treated fairly and courteously. That's why they'd take their lumps along with the next guy then and not now.
Surely you must remember the disgrace that was the last episode. Fair play and courtesy are not words I could wrangle from that debacle in a loving way. In fact, there was some maker commentary here to the effect has this reviewer stolen from us, after months of being fobbed off, one of us [me] posted a link to where to find said reviewer alive and well and peddling his own wares. He turned up here hours after promising the makers they would get their knives back and delivering some sop of an apology. I think it still took a few weeks for all the makers to get their knives back.
Be clear in that I may be well off base here. The facts of all this stand exactly as I report them above, but it would be foolish of me to believe I have an insight into the motivations of any of the makers. I make no claim to speak for any, yet that is my gut feeling. It's little more than intuition on my part but I think you do the makers a disservice with fizzle out. This was nothing so graceful. This was people voting with their feet after getting shafted.
