No pro designer would come up with what Patrick has now, and yet it works.

No pro designer would have come up with the new one, either. Any designer worth anything could have told you that the old logo was way better than the new one. The old logo has its problems, but it communicates exactly what it needs to. (And I think it's actually the strongest point of the entire page.) The 99designs logo is such a step back I really have no idea where to start. It communicates absolutely nothing. The image is generic, meaningless, and (in my opinion) ugly. The text is small and (especially in the context of the whole page) very hard to find and read.

It's really important to realize that design doesn't mean "nice looking" and it doesn't mean "professional". Those are the means to an end, not the end itself. Design is about purpose, and the reason the original logo is so much better than the new one is because the old logo makes clear exactly what BCC is and what it's for and the 99designs logo doesn't.

It's also really important to realize that you're designing for an audience, and Patrick's audience is teachers. They aren't generally going to care if the logo (or the rest of the site, even) screams 2002. If you're trying to sell to artists and designers you're going to have to put more work into making your logo look nice, but here it's really not what's most important.

Design is a lot deeper than aesthetics, and there are a ton of different things that have to go into a logo design. The takeaway from this shouldn't be that engineering trumps design: the 99designs logo is hardly designed at all, and you're not going to find many genuinely good designers at a place like 99designs.