Do you know what also distinguishes "arcane dimensions"/"retrojam"/"xmasjam" and many others from this jam? So-called "Order" and "Harmony". They achieve it either through sticking up to a set theme/rules, or they care about the overall presentence of their maps in the jam.
This jam has broken both of these rules. And compared to the previous "prototype" jams, this one was the worst. I only enjoyed " Exit Interview" by @Krak, "Qaizometry" by @Nostalgick and a bit less "Into Madness" by @Nolcoz. The rest was boring for me. They were rather proof for me that the quake has become a brainless shooter, where you touch the trigger and the enemy spawns... I am the kind of person who values exploration, and this is what I missing in most maps. Many maps had their own songs, but the problem with them was that they were simply not matching the environment I think. These would rather fit in the process of mapping and not the process of enjoying the map. Lots of monsters to kill... Even AD has fewer monsters to kill, I think. I am not a professional level designer, but I think that putting monsters into every place that you could imagine, makes the map predictable, and by that so boring.
Saying that this jam is a showcase of the community's strength is a misinterpretation, I think. In my opinion, the community was rather some kind of an echo chamber, where if someone drops some anime, everyone will start to repeat it... I simply thought that there wasn't any individuality there. The extension of a deadline, because of making sure that the people enjoy making their maps, was some sort of a socialist/populist move, which broke most of the maps. Deadline, effort, situation, anything that is on the mind of the mapper somehow gets itself into the map in small or a big portion, but that's what makes the maps human-like. I don't want to say that imperfection is what makes something good. But I just think that this decision has allowed people to make their maps so much pimped up, that they have become trash.
Anyway, that's what I think about this jam. You may hate me for this opinion, but I say that just to at least let the people know, how it was, from my perspective, hoping in mind that the quake community will not end as same as the population from the mice utopia experiment.
