I think if i participated id rather have been given nothing than a disappointing pod. If rare-ish prizes have been given out for participating in most, if not all of the old contests then people will assume that it is the same for the upcoming ones too. A pod takes literally 1 minute of standing in the fantasyland courtyard to achieve and some of these people may have put hours of work into what they designed. I just think may be you could have given participants a houdini or another experiment that is of that rarity, would that really have been too much to give?
It seems that since we had the idea of giving out in-game prizes on forums contests that it is just something that is expected that we should do constantly and that is not at all what we wanted from the idea. The idea was just something nice we wanted to do to incorporate both the game and the forums and give the forums a little more traffic and love. Just because it was done for some competitions, it does not by any means, mean that there will always be an exclusive prize to go with it.
The participants of this competition were awarded forums medals as well as an Experiment Pod. The winners were awarded their in-game made creations, respectable forums medals, and an experiment pod.
I hope that this post shows what we as a staff see when this sort of thing happens and hope that we can give better communication on this sort of thing in the future.