You mentioned "authentic" but thats the trap. Nobody cares if you ground the pepper yourself if the store bought rub tastes better. I've judged comps and the real angle is consistency. Store bought stuff is the same every time batch after batch. Home blends can change depending on humidity or if you're off on a measurement by a pinch. That 3rd place team probably nailed consistency while the homemade guy had a off day on his mix and didnt even know it.

Waiting for the big payoff from that slow burn was kinda boring though.

Over years of trying things, I learned @kai657's cure time trick is sadly invisible outside bike forums.

...and then it becomes this whole thing where everyone is too scared to actually call a mistake a mistake because it might hurt feelings. I mean, the whole point of a post-mortem is to figure out what went wrong so it doesn't happen again, right? It just seems like if you can't say "we screwed up" without everyone getting defensive, you're never going to fix the broken stuff in the first place.

Ed from Ed's Plumbing sounds like a straight shooter. I lowered mine to 120 a couple years ago after my cousin in Seattle told me he'd been doing it forever. It got me thinking about how many things we just set once and never question, like our fridge temps or our thermostat schedules. My gas bill dropped about 12 bucks a month, nothing massive but it adds up over a year.