Just to stress, these are my personal feelings. I have nothing but respect for the huge amounts of effort people put into running awards (well, as long as they take the time to talk to the people whose fics are nominated -- I really don't know what to do about my recent discovery of

The arguments in favour of awards that I can see are that they provide recognition for authors, and help readers find good fic. That's all great, and I'm sure they do (I won't deny that I got egoboo off the nomination emails). But as far as I'm concerned, feedback and recs work perfectly well for those functions without any of the drawbacks.