I think Sheby Lee Adam's work looked horribly printed. Even as reproductions, you could tell they were just awful print quality.
Your right about Ed Freeman's work who starts off with the two landscapes, then goes into these over-Photoshopped nudes. Personally, even though I don't care for over-Photoshopped images that much, I found the nudes to be more interesting and stronger photographs. However, I thought this issue was where people submitted a portfolio of 8-15 images that all went together? I'm not sure how this would be called a portfolio, because they are totally different.
I found some of the best work to be in the Merit section. All of the photographs that took the higher awards did not excite me all that much. Overdone blurry water pictures, Michael Kenna style pictures, 35mm overinhanced digital landscapes, the PointLobos images which were decent.
What's sad is the number of photographers that got published, that don't even do "fine art" or even black and white! After looking at many of their websites, I found lots of them are only commercial photographers, and even found a few examples where the person work was ALL COLOR, but a few images were converted to B&W for the sake of the magazing publishing.