Plagiarism is obviously unacceptable, attempting to skirt the fact of it by talking about nine lines of original content where twelve were copied from the work of another, verbatim and without credit was always going to agitate people.
Speaking for the poetry category (the one I paid most attention to) it is also something that was compounded by an appearance of bias rooted in the inscrutability of the voting; what was the relative weighting of form, content, structural semiotics, and the poem’s context within the setting of New Eden?
In a competition where the judges are a self-selected cross section of a small and insular community, it should be expected that people outside that clique are sensitive to prejudiced outcomes–something guaranteed as much in the fact as appearance of by unstructured voting based solely on the judges’ personal preferences.