TL;DR: They arbitrarily rejected Tyson Tan's popular entry Libbie for personal reasons, fucked about with the contest rules while it was running, outright neglected to vet entries for plagiarism with several of those entries getting to the final rounds, and pretty much blamed the community for the abandoned contest's failure.
You have no idea how popular Libbie was with the community considering Tyson Tan was involved and made other mascots for FOSS projects, plus there was other examples that got rejected for arbitrary reasons such as the cockatoo.
TL;DR: They arbitrarily rejected Tyson Tan's popular entry Libbie for personal reasons, fucked about with the contest rules while it was running, outright neglected to vet entries for plagiarism with several of those entries getting to the final rounds, and pretty much blamed the community for the abandoned contest's failure.
That sounds pretty based, what seems to be the problem
You have no idea how popular Libbie was with the community considering Tyson Tan was involved and made other mascots for FOSS projects, plus there was other examples that got rejected for arbitrary reasons such as the cockatoo.
So the people in charge saw a degenerate faggot's art, and instead of bowing to hordes of faggots, rejected it.
Based.