I’m going to preface this by saying that I’ve tried to write something for two Game Chefs so far and failed both times. I like the lower quality bar. Given the time line I feel like anything higher would discourage new and inexperienced writers from taking part… which would be a big loss for us as a whole, since people need prompting and patience to become experienced.

I also think you’d need to relax the time constraints if you raise the bar. Unless someone is freelancing full time and has the saved up money to not work that week (or has a “real” job and is willing to burn a week of vacation on writing a game… haha, no!) that is just flat out not enough time to go through the cycles of consideration and playtesting you need to publish something.