For the nominations users at least had the option to skip sections if they couldn't think of anything to nominate. For the voting, in order to get the participation reward players had to vote for something in each category.
This led to a lot of users who don't care about the actual voting and just wanting the participation to vote for the one game they recognized in the category.
Guessing short sighted algorithms. Because you can see on Valves side of things, packages have been updated/added/etc this year which probably allows it to be picked up.
They do like money, but Valve also loves providing a service to people.
Nobody uses Epic Games, Origin, Ubisoft Connect, or Battle.net because they want to, they use it because they have to.
Steam Awards is a bit janky sure, but to say that their inability to run pointless awards properly ruins the convenience and value that Steam brings to its users would be a gross overstatement.
No they don’t care about the service, we should be able to play games without steam client, we should be able to resell digital games, developers should not had to pay $100 non refundable fees to upload one game each time, etc.
Neither in steam, the keysellers are scams and the developers can scam you with the key. You don’t own the game, Nintendo lets you own games in physical format and has never let publishers remove them.