i didn't mention this but as one of the non-tangledeep voters, exploring the shifting stones was genuinely one of my favourites to date and would've easily gotten my vote in any other match but poleva desert was like a 9.5 to me at least
so
it hurts to see it treated like it was, and i knew it would be but desperately hoped it wouldn't. it's like, people seem to be extremely quick to dismiss songs purely based off genre here. poleva having two key defining aspects to it that are inherently polarising on the board, each with minimal overlap here (classical and lol rhythm game), seems to have just given a ton of people (even outside the ones that openly harbor resentment toward said things) reasons to arbitrarily dismiss it regardless of how good it is at being the thing it is, its own strengths that made it setlist worthy despite these factors and all. not having a household composer name like zircon attached to it also didn't help. chamber chu? more like chamber who
credit of course to shifting stones for being given a chance to actually flex that as an advantage. another big part of why it worked out how it did is because a lot of people heard it and realised "wow i don't like zircon but this is a song i wouuld actually like" aka. it actually does appeal to present board tastes so much more than one would otherwise expect from zircon lol
in other words, poleva basically got treated as a nonfactor in its own match, zircon alone controlled his destiny