No offence but, I find it odd that you blame the level of interest in your entry to the timeframe of the contest. Three months to work on a game is not a whole lot in general. Especially if you only have a couple evenings and the weekends to work on it.
It is however true. When I work on a game for a month I enjoy all the time spent on it. Games that take more than a month of my time start stealing time from other things I want to do.

The way I see it is that noone bothers post because they dont expect any feedback anyway. It could be seen as a waste of time. (and yes please do prove to me that I'm wrong )
Every single game I develop I post onto PGD. Sometimes I get no feedback but I post each and every one. I realise my games are really really simple. But they are complete finished games being posted - often with source code. Very few people comment on them (Savage and Traveller being stand out exceptions) - but I continue to post. And only once have I recieved a comment on my source and the logic in my code.

I seldom get a chance to download a game. I download when at home with a 56K modem connected at about 40k - anything bigger than 1MB takes forever I try and comment on screenshots when available to make up for it.

I dont think your comments were too negative. They were unfortunatly true. As I said in my previous post also - the average age here is higher. A large number of members on this board have kids. Not many other game dev boards can say the same thing. So when I do have time - I'd rather work on my game than download someone elses (Sorry for that). And when I dont want to work on my game I'll probably watch a movie with my wife also in preference... And I think this applies to a large number of people here.

The contest has brought more members to the site - while maybe not all active more members is good anyway.