I genuinely thought my entry was a strong, well-produced and thrilling song. Iām honestly shocked and utterly disappointed that it didnāt make it to the final. Itās a major let-down - not only did I not expect to get stuck in the semi-final, but I actually believed it had a solid shot at placing in the top 10 in the final. Clearly, I was wrong. Moreover, this marks my 9th non-qualification out of the 12 entries Iāve sent while playing for Spain. I truly believe something isnāt working here, and I donāt think Iām the only one who needs to take a moment and reflect.
WV does change quite a bit over time of course. Like two years ago we saw people like Nelisa and hjarnskakning enter, John1 returned, then last year Celka and Hamster joined, so that made pot C/D songs a lot more viable. Now lately there's a lot of pot E/F returnees like lavie, Lupus, Zobz and Eula is also back so suddenly sending grannie songs is viable again etc. There's a cost to this and it's in pot A/B, more specifically those who tend to sit on the D-side of pot B. Fierro and Ana Raquel also are having more trouble than they usually would and I was able to ride that C/D wave very well but my times as a high flyer are probably over as well now that the meta shifted to E/F by quite a bit.
Als keep in mind that the contest getting larger punishes niche songs in general. You'll have more people in that safe space sending inoffensive songs that vacuum up those 1-3 points before niche songs do and more people voting for those too. Like the maths are just against you when you're trying to get creative while competition grows.
Then as a third argument some of the newer people are absolute power players. Nelisa, John1 and hjarnskakning almost always filter for songs they can win with. I have brought this up with them before, but you can't blame them for doing what they do. It has a price in other people though, qualifying gets harder for everyone and there's less room for playing around.
But yeah this is all text, I agree that your low score this edition in particular is bullshit at face value. Top 10 is pipe dreams, but I did expect you to be in the convo for a Q this edition and we had Gabor doing pre-contest predictions and he had you in the final, so I mean your disappointment is entirely valid.