[cshimmin]

Hm, I wonder if you could do something like a tournament bracket for pitches. Ask it to do pairwise evaluations between business plans/proposals. "If you could only invest in A -OR- B, which would you choose and what is your reasoning?". If you expect ~80% of pitches to be a no, then take the top ~20% of the tourney. This objective is much more neutral (one of them has to win), so hopefully the only way the model can be a "people-pleaser" is to diligently pick the better one.

Obviously, this only works if you have a decent size sample to work from. You could seed the bracket with a 20/80 mix of existing pitches that, for you, were a yes/no, and then introduce new pitches as they come in and see where they land.