How does the community feel about professional vs amateur maps?

[Raptori]

I tend to feel it's a bit of a waste of space for me to comment just to say "good job", since it feels like I'm adding absolutely nothing to the conversation. The few times when I do comment to congratulate someone it's generally because the work is so good that I feel compelled to praise it, particularly when I want to highlight something specific I feel works perfectly. If I have a specific criticism then I'll post it, but that's far less common on finished maps than it is for a WIP for obvious reasons.

If it's a WIP then there is far more scope to comment on the direction and the style, give pointers etc since it's at a point where it's all very relevant for the person making the map, and simply giving encouragement feels much less redundant. A lot of people find it hard to stay motivated and see something through to the end, so encouragement can be a real help at that point.

Obviously I can't be sure, but I would guess that those are the underlying reasons for a large number of people behaving in this way. When that happens, you'll get what you've noticed - a load of comments on partially finished work, and far fewer on finished ones.

Edit: also completely agree with Azelor re battlemaps vs world/regional maps. I'm probably inherently more interested in the larger scale things, and to make it worse I've only played D&D once (really enjoyed it though, just happens that my schedule rarely fits with the D&D GM friend I have), so I feel even more useless when commenting on battlemaps than I do elsewhere