When I heard that public voting was a 50% component of every category, I wasn't too happy.

There's a huge number of problems with that. Obviously, people can try to get all their friends to give them 5 stars across the board.

Also, I'd guess that the first couple votes have a huge impact on the rest of the votes because the voting page had the previous votes right below it. I'd guess that people are unlikely to stray too far from the other votes they see due to subconscious groupthink. I'm not sure if the judges also saw the votes on their voting page, but if so, that might have seriously impacted the outcome.

I would have preferred to see one popularity category decided by public voting, with the rest solely decided by judges.

But I'm not that mad. I wasn't really expecting to win a category, and most of the value came from learning node and being forced to get a whole lot done in 48 hours. And the winners seemed reasonable.