No one will find a map more fancy because that damn windshield moves with the train. The judge, I think it's Andy, certainly knows what can easily be done with spirit and what is tough and will give a judgement based on that.
When people hear spirit, most of them think of the stupid movewith function. Spirit is more than that. Half-Life does have more features than a 3 storey elevator, too. And no one will let you win a compo because you have been...
lazy
...when using spirit.
Vassy:
It's not mapping skill, and only increases file size. Sounds, models and textures can easily be taken from other mods anyway.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Taken models that other people made do not show you mapping skill, using them well does. Spirit shows your mapping skill, because the entity handling and the complexity heavily dencrease the ease of working with it.
Vassy:
Spirit is an HL mod.
It is now! Even in the custom games dialogue of HL it says 'toolpack'.
As I said above, spirit is still 80% Half-Life. It increases the flexibility and the possibility of using the features of the engine with the need to code.
Why are you so afraid of spirit? Do you fear a spirit-monster-mapper attack?
Someone who can build good maps on spirit, must also have a lot of experience with normal Half-Life mapping. With spirit he can just add some fancy boni to the map. If spirit add pixel shader FX or something far away from the basic Half-_ife, I'd agree with you. But it doesn't. It offers more entities, that's all.