Character Sheets: Any sheet that includes the sexual orientation section can pound sand. If your character's orientation isn't useful or made apparent in their history or personality -- two parts of the character sheet that exist to answer questions about their experiences, views, lifestyle, etc. -- then it feels sort of tacked-on. I was never a fan of the mandatory image rule, either, as I find it begets itself to lazy descriptions beefed up with arbitrary scars that are never to be heard of again.

Formatting: I have never opened a centered [youtube] song on Roleplayerguild.com and thought to myself "Gee, this song is both musically pleasing and fitting, I sure am glad they put this here." I also never dug GMs who put flavor text all over their interest checks and OOCs. A hackneyed philosophical quote by your header is okay, but anything more than that crosses the line for me.

Build-Up: You can sort of gauge the skill of a GM based on whether or not their interest check sounds like a blurb or a tutorial. If I have to get four paragraphs in to start understanding the interstellar feudal monarchy of the kingdom of Hoopajoop where the story takes place, you lost me. I think the reason for this is that people who base their writing on books they have read use the interest check to act as a blurb -- a literal standard of [i]advertising[/i] -- whereas people who base their writing on video games and tv shows are used to media that doesn't need to advertise the meat of their stories, and thus, sounds a little flimsy when presented in this format. When you want to write a story that's ostensibly Halo, the interest check has to build the entire world from the top-down, starting with the fun Master Chief space marines you're trying to sell and ending with the historical reasons for alien military expansion or whatever Halo was supposed to be about.