As a Judge in last years competition I played all of the games thoroughly. I have to say it did not make any difference if someone use a pre-built engine or wrote something from scratch. One of my faviorite games was written from scratch uisng just the Directx headers, the winner just used Asphere as a base. The previous year the winner used GlScene which is a much more complete engine.

I agree people starting from scratch have a lot more to code that people using engines, but it is a choice at the end of the day. I'm sure there are teams who competed last year who will enter this year and do things differently (use an different engine etc), this means they have learnt from the experieice.

Also there is nothing stopping people from asking for help during the competition , as long at the Judges don't get invloved thats OK. It also encourgages more traffic on the site.

I think that that fact that all the competitors help each other out in the competitions shows what a great community this is.