Pete,
This is just a theme as aposed to a competition.
This area of the forum is for competitions and themes
The idea behind this weekly theme, is not about who can produce the best image, but who, in the relativly short period of time, can come up with anything at all...
It is a motivational exercise and the whole idea (as I understood it when it was put to me) is that there is no time for preparation! A theme is started, with a short period of time to come up with somthing within a fixed theme...
Think of it as a weekly challenge as aposed to a competition ... If it turns into a competition then fair enough, but to start off it's just a weekly challenge to see how many of us can come up with something.
That all said, I take your point, and think there is scope for running more in-depth competitions with prior warning... For eg we could run an autumn competion with last entries in for the 31st of October maybe, and then all vote for the winner after?
But like I said, in this case we are looking for weekly motivational tasks