I am Switzerland on this one, because I find the idea exciting and I see it has popular support. However, I thought Troy's concerns were good ones — except that I didn't know how to address them, personally, while still keeping the contest. This is a failing on my part alone, of course. But yeah, I'm neutral, despite being pleased by the idea.
I would like to see what the rest of the Community heads have to say about this in particular — Zyn as the team captain, and Mann and Photo as the Community admins whose opinion I am unsure of.
Also, either way, thank you to Light for putting so much hard work into this, and dealing with the running around (for months, now) required to make this happen!
EDIT: I do have one other note of support; a contest as opposed to a challenge is much more high-profile and means that the winners will get on the front page, emphasizing that writing short is a positive quality. It's been trendy to overwhelm the reader with wholly unnecessary walls of text and then One Entertaining Thing to earn an upvote. This is pretty terrible. These articles look like Moose posting on O5!
(This is not to say that all long articles are badly written. We have lots of fantastic stuff that's practically novel length, like Silberescher's infamous Star Signals. But still.)
ALSO: I almost always favor judges in combination with a popular vote.
My concern is works placing significantly higher based on "author popularity" or how much time people have to hang out in 19 or popular side chats and link their stories. Judges using a rubric can ameliorate this. And needing to create such a rubric can also serve to address some of the potential issues raised with the contest — you won't see a forum challenge.
Additionally, if people can be penalized for poor sportsmanship, then they're less likely to be jerks. And that's not an unlikely possibility given that any contest creating mainlist SCPs is going to be higher profile. Tensions run high with any high-profile contest.
Just a recommendation, not a mandate.
On the other hand, SCPs get so much attention anyway that placing higher based on author reputation or activity may not be an issue. I also acknowledge it's more work for a contest designed to be quick and easy. It's not the end of the world if this is purely vote-based.
(And since these are SCPs, I think that the popular vote should be taken into account either way.)