They started to award more participants as much as possible and giving the free bonus is their way to appreciate the luck and real participants. There’s a lot of artist who skip the recent contest, I guess its because of the theme or maybe they there are just busy. Well, there’s a new art contest and I expect to see more participants this time as the theme is not that hard.
Some popular artists did not join recent contests does not mean Roobet contests become less attractive with them.
They have many activities in life and sometimes they don't have time to visit the forum or don't have time to create arts for joining recent art contests. They even have time but simply are lack of ideas to join. Many reasons and I can not step in shoes of artists to say why they did not participate in recent contests hosted by Roobet team and Hhampuz.
Well, you have a very good point which I personally agree to, another reason is the possiblity that some of this users must have made money some how and might not be particularly interested in contests with little amount of money as reward, saying this because I have a friend who used to be a forum buddy to me here, I heard he luckily made over $200,000 from a crypto he invested in a long time ago, then he completely stopped coming online here on the forum, he used to be very serious with signature campaign since that acted as his primary source of income for several months, or should I say over 2 years, but as soon as he made this money, he abandoned all that and left the forum completely.
The above is just one of the possibilities though, but still for me, the most likely reason is that which you have said, time, that is, lack of time due to whatever be the reason, and besides, the top creators not participating in this round of the contest, simply means they are giving other lesser contestants the opportunity to become top creators as well .