I liked this podcast episode! I am a little confused by things that were said, though...
Reck, you want the Scummies to be this big thing that everyone can rally behind. You also mention that some members of scumchat collectively roll their eyes at any mention of the Scummies. It seems like wanting to make the Scummies even bigger than they are currently will only further alienate those members of the chat. Why even try to cater to those individuals?
I loved the first ever Scummies that I read when I joined the site. I think that was the '11 or '12 Scummies ceremony. It reminded me of something that did not take itself too seriously, yet still had strands of honor and recognition that everyone admired. I fear making it bigger ruins the charm it currently has. You worry about people replacing into games specifically for that award. Making the ceremony bigger and more spectacular will only increase that risk across the board. Instead of playing the game for fun, people will now play for the recognition of getting an award.
Why do you want to remove the Best Town Performance? It only makes sense to have both a Best Town Performance and a Best Scum performance? Why have one without the other? I think the issue with Best Town is not the award itself. Rather, I think the issue is the metric or scale that the judges use to assess the winner. Yes, you are going to be rewarding people who should not win the award, but that punishes the people who did deserve to win the award. Best Town Performance is not body of work like Paragon, just as Best Scum Performance is to Don Corleone. Restricting the impact of a good town to just an individual player counters the whole site mentality of having fun and playing a game with a group of people. Especially if the Scummies become a grandiose spectacle.
Also, removing Best Town Performance removes a large portion of your potential "Academy" members if you want to change to that style of voting.
I'm not entirely exactly sure what issue you have with the current iteration of the Scummies. I think that the awards themselves are recognized within the actual game forums. People are lynched based on Burden of Proficiency as town/scum all the time. The Scummies Winvitational continues to be a game that people want to play (whether or not for the recognition or a cool setup remains to be seen). Turning the Scummies into something more serious than it already is runs the risk of having all the bad aspects of both Team Mafia and the Crosstown games.
Having the Podcast thread in General Discussion is already a good step to reintroducing the game of Mafia to the site's users as it bridges the gap between the game and just a general hangout quite well.
Also sorry for being one of those shitty judges that flaked out after doing basically nothing.