An outsider like me is certainly in a poor place to do it, and I’m sorry for advancing my guesses with an over-confident tone. Only you guys can assess the dollar cost of the extra editorial time that gets sucked into this, and decide whether on the whole that’s a cost worth paying against the much-harder-to-measure odds of excluding profitable authors. (It’s also a cost worth mitigating–it’s great that you coach your selected authors on this, I’m sure you do it very well, and I’m sorry I missed out on it.)
Absolutely–I’m from the transitional era. 
But isn’t the contest a different way again, and one in which there’s some danger of discouraging good authors if issues of code quality are given too prominent a place?
I wasn’t using myself/XoR as an example because I’m personally affected, but because I thought CoG might be more likely to do some reflection based on the concrete example of a successful game. There’s another very good author who spoke up upthread, and I wasn’t sure whether the implications of what he and others said were being taken seriously or not.