3D Design Contest Answered

No idea - but finalists are already up.

Hence the stress.

I know
Stressing ...

Me too. Personally I think you have a good shot.

The problem is probably two fold.
One, since each winner can only win one prize they have to work out who gets books. If a first 50 submission also wins a prize then their book should go to entry 51, etc. They also have to weed multiple entries out of the first 50. I was a finalist in a different contest that had a member with multiple finalist entries so they had to work out who got the extra prizes and it took a while beyond the stated date.
Two, these contests are often judged, at least in part, by a third party. Usually the sponsor, in this case Chris Anderson. This means it's out of Instructables hands once they send the finalists to him. They can settle on a date but he has other responsibilities and may take longer then initially projected.

All of that equals stress for us. As soon as a contest's voting closes I become an obsessive email watcher, which ramps up on the day the announcement is supposed to be made if I'm a finalist. I've been getting a little adrenaline spike every time my phone says "2 new messages" ever since Monday. :D