[chipotle_coyote]

I can't speak to your personal motivations/preferences, but the viewpoint you're espousing was pushed hard by the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, who were (a) very highly politically motivated themselves, and (b) based on the evidence of the works they advocated for during their campaigns, manifestly failed to demonstrate that better works were being systematically discounted for award consideration.

I don't doubt that there are worthy books that never made the ballot for various reasons, and I don't doubt that there are books that don't make the ballot due to fan politics and personalities. But it was hard not to notice that it was very, very hard to get any Puppy to point to more than one of a handful of titles as "proof" of the Hugos being taken over by the Evil Liberal SJWs: the short story "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachael Swirsky; Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It was hard, in the final analysis, not to draw the parallels between the Puppies and the GamerGate crowd: one got the impression that they didn't really care how bad the case they were making was, because it was a proxy for a larger conservative culture war.

Again, I'm not necessarily ascribing any of this to you, but generally speaking the last few years of Hugo and Nebula Award winners/nominees have been both critically acclaimed and popular, with very few if any titles being stories that nobody particularly liked but just had the perception of "being important" in the way, say, it seems at least one Best Picture nominee always is ("Green Book," anyone?).