Five years ago, you where da man if you understood BSP trees. Nowadays, it's hard to be above average. Expectations are the key problem here. If someone posts an IOTD with some nice graphics, no-one is going to encourage the poor guy to actually write a game with it. You're not going to get away with a simple game anymore.
People expect more.
Too much, actually. Even the breeding grounds of the game industry, the demo scene, suffers from this. No longer do technological masterpieces automatically win contests, like they used to. I know, 'spot' is a technological masterpiece, and I've seen more, especially 64Kb intros. Nevertheless, demos, just like games, require relatively little technical knowledge, and lots of good art.