[quote=@Odin]
<Snipped quote by Dervish>

I'd add that fourth; it also helps out weed out those players who aren't capable of writing a larger post/biography in a set amount of time. Writing slowly is one thing, taking a month to write a 6 paragraph biography of your character is another. 
[/quote]

Also a fair point, although I've only ever had a very small handful of instances where people didn't make the deadline, and that was almost always because they either started their sheet too late, couldn't think of ideas to flesh it out, or life came up.