[@Terminal] I believe "gratuitous" in this case means enough to call into question the suitability of posting the story openly, as opposed to some other arbitrary standard.  The guild does have a rule of good taste and a general rule that 18+ content (which does include violence when applied to other mediums, so I don't see why it wouldn't here as well) must be kept to PM.  It's not technically included in as many words, but there's also the issue of what people are willing to read.  Can't have a contest without judges, yeah?  I personally would rather have a couple "arbitrary" rules rather than no opportunity at all.  And since this is more of a community vote thing, setting sensible limits seems entirely reasonable to me.

It should be noted that any contest is going to be a matter of what the judges feel they can do fairly and well, at least if they're doing their job right.  Just because you are able to dedicate the kind of time to read massive entries doesn't mean all of them are.  Remember also that this is not a simple pass/fail standard, but rather competition -- restricting entries so that comparisons are easier to make can assist the judging process.  It is not pointless, it's just not a writer-centered call.  All rules are imposed equally.  While perhaps the point of this competition is not to challenge the writers in the same way yours are, it does not make it a less worthy competition.  And again, as this is community driven and I know that there are a lot of people out there that go "lol tl;dr", restricting length actually encourages fairness.  It decreases the likelihood of people reading only the ones that didn't exhaust them and then only voting between those and not even considering others because of length.

I will admit that perhaps a higher limit would be *nice* when two authors are involved, but...in the end, there's practical concerns to consider.