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Notes -
I've followed the Hugos since ~2004ish -- and been crotchity yelling at cloud over Best Related Work never being that Related or that Best almost the whole time -- so a good part of it's just me yelling at clouds.
That said, even in recent years there's often been occasional good results: Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ is definitely the sort of thing that I'd expect to be schlocky Blue Tribe culture war porn and lack introspection, and it's definitely a Blue Tribe work, but it's a lot more self-criticizing than you'd expect -- not a 10/10 work, but definitely more worth the time than you'd see from the summary. I found Ted Chiang through The Merchant and the Alchemist, and older folks would have known about his Story of Your Life a decade and a half before Arrival, for example.
And the Hugos in particular were nice because you'd get a big voter's packet with all of the finalist pieces together. While sometimes you got some stinkers (and there have always been stinkers), just a couple good works outside of your normal wheelhouse would often pay for the membership.
At a deeper level... while you can be a successful writer in other ways and other approaches, the field and especially the successful commercial part of the mainstream field is both insular and incestuous. Even if you don't care about any particular award or convention hall speech or signing-books-for-dollars, they're often how behind-the-scenes discussions bring a sudden consensus forward.
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