Completely agree with you here. Personally I made the CCC that way as a conscious choice because my main goal with the CCC was to be a catalyst to the relatively weak concepting community that was present at the time. In my eyes the CCC and MCCC accomplish two different things with the same medium, the MCCC provides a challenge that requires ingenuity and experience whereas the CCC is a much more broad 'showcase' that more encourages systematic feedback (albeit I need to work on that bit better) and new unique ideas.
The reason why it was weak was because most of (us? the?) conceptors were attached to the Forums, which is much better if you have a long post (as on the first page, you can keep scrolling down and see the same style of post, there's no break between the opening post and the comments. Additionally, since you have to see the posts in the order they were made, you can't say that the post with extra information was hidden, it was right there all along.
Here, though, anybody using the reddit view* instead of the vbulletin view** could, if the author's secondary post with extra information doesn't garner a lot of upvotes, say that it was hidden and they couldn't see it.
Additionally, the fact that the character limit per opening post here is 24000, and on the Forums it's 50000 for both opening posts and replies makes it much, much, much harder to actually post a real character. See Ephrial, the Blazing Swordsman's post here... versus his Forum one. There's tons of extra content in the Forum post because of how much larger the character limit is... and even THEN, more space was needed.
So HERE, you are basically forced to make your entire concept in <24000 characters. On the Forums, you could use as many pages as you wanted-- See The Champion Creation Guide by Katsuni for an extreme example of "need more space". Since replies here are limited to 4096 characters, people can't just hide away their concepts inside the thread-- they HAVE to make a separate one. In my opinion, this is actually bad, because it means that they invite themselves to be struck by people not interested in the concept creation community, people that just have some spare time but don't want to read an idea all the way through and try to understand the background. People that will just downvote the thread and move on, preventing the people that actually may peruse it whole-heartedly from doing so easily, discouraging the person...
Er, wait. That's me ranting against Boards.
* You probably know it as Discussion
** You probably know it as Chronological
As far as the future goes I personally would love to create a 'Master tier' MCCC (current MCCC set-up) that has RP prizes and the like and a 'Silver-tier' (current CCC set-up) that focuses more on a kind of 'introductory' concepting contest with more superficial prizes (like the gifs) for the aforementioned reason. Of course that's a rough idea.
I think that the CCC not as good at helping somebody learn because it doesn't give you some ground rules. Having a platform off which to go on is much better than having nothing at all, in my opinion and experience. But I understand the point-- something that has a fairly low barrier to entry. I agree with that being a good idea, I just think that the people that are looking for a contest are the people dedicated to the craft, the people that won't mind staying and learning... But will leave if they find themselves under attack too often because they are human beings.
