Yeah, that is a vastly better system. It's intimidating for me as a relatively n00b who will never win a single award and has a hard time getting to cons, but I can fill out forms and nerd out.

I've generally been pretty happy with the Nebula virtual programming but it kind of sucked this year, too. Only two days, and heavily on the Friday. Which, if one of your reasons for not travelling is work, means that you can't attend most of the virtual things.

Anyway, they managed to somehow pick panellists before out of presumably a quite large pool without resorting to the Plagiarism Machine, so I do think it's quite lazy.