This is a bit of a sore subject for me. In general I'm not a fan of model competitions; I think they do at least as much harm as they do good. I'm a big fan of non-competitive model exhibitions, in which people are encouraged to bring in their models, look at other people's work, talk, learn, and have fun. Some years ago Mystic Seaport Maritime Museum sponsored a juried exhibition of ship models. A panel of judges identified all the entries that came up to a certain standard, and put them all on exhibit - without passing judgment on which was the best, second-best, etc. I like that approach.
That said, I have to admit that I owe a chunk of my career to the Mariners' Museum competition. I got my job there as a direct result of the 1980 contest, and I wrote most of the rules for the one in 1985. I also served as a judge in the 1990 version. There's no denying that the event was a big stimulus to high-quality ship modeling - and it certainly gave me a personal and professional boost at a time when I desperately needed one.
I left the Mariners' Museum in 1983 and, except for agreeing to be a judge in 1990, I've had nothing to do with the competition since then. When I discovered that the museum was charging $50 for each entry I was utterly appalled. I vividly remember the directive that Bill Wilkinson, the director of the museum in the '70s and '80s (and a first-class gentleman), issued when he started the event: "it is to be an easy competition to enter but a hard one to win." In the 1990 event (the only one where I was actually "behind the scenes") there were, as I recall, about a hundred entries. The other two judges and I were taking leave from our jobs and families, and the museum was paying our expenses while we stayed in a local hotel. We worked on that contest full-time for three days, and read ourselves to sleep in the hotel with the notebooks that the competitors submitted with their models. The first thing we had to do, though, was rule out about half of the entries, so we'd have time to give the other fifty or so a really thorough examination. Those first fifty non-winners got about ten minutes of attention apiece. (If you saw them, you'd understand why.) Ten minutes each for about fifty models. From the standpoint of the judges that was a full day of judging - a third of the time we had available. But to charge somebody $50 for the privilege of getting his or her model looked at for ten minutes was an outrage and a perversion of the event's original purpose - especially in view of the fact that the contest was bringing lots of paying customers through the museum's turnstiles. I made those points in a letter to the current director, and got thoroughly and predictably ignored. That's one of several reasons why I don't go to the MM any more.
I'm not sure why the competition got canceled, though I've heard a rumor or two. For the past several years I've made it a point not to be associated with that contest, or anything else involving that museum. With a couple of hundred students per year, three stepchildren, a mortgage, and three insane cats, I can find plenty of other reasons to keep my blood pressure up.
I believe I read in one of the ship model journals that the Navy Museum in Washington was thinking about sponsoring a competition that would serve as a replacement for the MM one, but I haven't heard anything more specific than that. In my opinion a big ship modeling event is a great idea, but I do wish the competitive side of it could be toned down or eliminated. Some of the correspondence and phone calls surrounding the MM contests got pretty ugly - and downright childish.
There's my two cents' worth. Like I said, this is a sore subject.