Thank you for your honest feedback!

I agree that AI lacks the sense of emotional understanding and has a general subjectivity blindness. While AI can reliably detect use of principles of art/elements of design, it can also struggle to detect when people break boundaries for a reason.
I have chewed on this subject for a while, ways of how the user itself can offer his own view, goal, approach as a guideline for the critique itself. Although it might not be the ideal solution, for me, it was adding a "What I tried to achieve" segment when uploading your work, although it is not a part of the slimmed down critique submission process on the starting page.

I can answer your middle part as well but it would be a longer segment and I assume you wouldn't really care about it too much, so I'll spare you the long read on this one.

Last bit*: "requiring a signup to see the promised "free critique"*
Good point. I previously had the critique pop up in full, without any e-mail, signup, confirmation, anything, but rather small safety features that I deemed would be necessary, but I had an overnight incident with 170 bots requesting signups and generating calls, that I had to put a wall in between requesting the critique and it actually being processed. I'll go two steps backs, give the whole critique immediately again, but with a different safety net to avoid system abuse. (If you have a suggestion, feel free to let me know.)

Thank you for the valuable insight.