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I would love to get everybody's opinions on different tea competitions and whether or not this is truly a sign of "the best" teas.

I'll leave my opinion out of it for now so as not to bias anybody. Feel free to differentiate between US-based competitions, which tend to be more broad based, and local competitions which often focus on a specific type of tea.

To help guide the conversation, here are some questions that I came up with, but feel free to go in a different direction:
1. Are winning teas really the "best-of-breed", or at least top 5%?
2. Are they worth the extra price premium associated with winning?
3. Which competitions (if any) are most trustworthy? Which are least?
4. Do competitions help move the tea industry forward, or are they doing damage in some way?
5. Who wins and loses from competitions? The end-consumer? The Farmers? etc.

Can't wait to hear all the thoughts out there!

Intriguing questions! I'll limit my comments to Taiwanese competitions as they are the ones that I know best.

I'll state right off that at one point, back in the 80's and maybe the 90's competitions brought increased attention to teas and tea regions in Taiwan and generally served a useful purpose. That purpose has largely been realized, however, and competitions today do more to hurt than to help growers and especially consumers.

Most significantly, competitions have tended to reduce stylistic variation in given tea types for producers increasingly began to craft their teas to specifically to please the palates of the judges. A good example can be found in the Pinglin area where bao zhong tea now has a single accepted style; in this case low oxidation. Back in the 80's and 90's there were several styles competing against one another and the differences among them were easy to detect. Competitions are also at least partially culpable for the "greening" of gaoshan. Greener oolongs are more immediately floral and fruity on the palate; more highly oxidized ones tend to be subtler (although the layers of flavor in these teas is truly remarkable.)

Competitions do not necessarily produce "best-of-breed" results. Some of the most interesting of teas are never entered into these events. The best one can say is that they yield the best of what is entered, and I'm not so sure about that either.

Consumers definitely lose from competitions for the winning teas become terribly overpriced. But the farmers lose too for their teas without prizes will always be considered wanting by many.

I agree.

Any competition really presents the supposed best of what was entered. Usually they serve best whoever invented it...

The more interesting teas usually come from people who do not care about fame, but about the teas they are making.

In Taiwan there is certainly a positive effect for the winner as anyone who won a prestigious price is automatically assumed to have superior ware, no matter how much people know about the workings of the competition. Goes for coffee shops, design, tea and so on...