This was kept in reserve for a long time, but in light of discussion in the comments of this blog post, I decided to post this in the hopes that it will be helpful to the ongoing discussion there.
As I see it, the current Awards system has two main purposes: giving constructive criticism to articles, and recognizing really good articles on the wiki through analysis of these articles. We already have the former in the form of the Critique forum board (somewhat unused, but existing nonetheless), but the latter is basically only served through the Awards right now. That said:
While the Awards are sometimes useful for constructive criticism and recognition, I see two main flaws in the system. One is that it seems very forced, making users tend to not do as many articles as they should, not give as high quality reviews as they should, get very stressed out, or any combination of the three. The other is that it's based on comparing articles to other articles rather than finding the objective merit of the articles in question; however, we already have the Featured Article for comparing articles to each other, and comparing articles in the SFW Awards system in particular largely winds up with a lot of good articles ultimately losing to other good articles because those other good articles are just a bit better. So, here's my new Awards idea:
A user submits a candidate to the Awards system. Users can then come by at their leisure, unrelated to what previous articles they've voted on, and give the article a vote (up/down/neutral), backing it up with a critique to explain why they're giving the vote that they are. After a certain period of time ends and/or a certain number of users have been reached, the article may be given an award if it got a high enough percentage of positive feedback and a high enough total balance. (Optionally, there could be multiple awards for recognizing articles that have lower percentages and/or lower total balances, but are still seen as reasonably good.)
The new system that I've proposed in the fourth paragraph is designed with the intentions of 1) eliminating the feeling of forcedness, as users can vote or not vote on any given article, and 2) eliminating the comparisons to other articles, as each article would be voted on on its own. I'm hoping that this system could get more users to vote on articles more frequently and allow more really high-quality articles to gain recognition for their greatness.
If you have any comments on this system, please let me know here, back at the original discussion, or, if we get a Discord server for the Awards discussion, let me know there!