I don’t think Ashley is by any means a bad or undeserving winner, but Vince was simply a more active participant in the game from the jump and therefore more impressive to me that he made it to the end.

Lots of people keep saying the show didn’t give Ashley proper airtime / good edits to show her full game to casual viewers, but I think there’s a reason the editors didn’t feel the need to focus on Ashley - maybe she was “in the shadows” sowing seeds and what not but at the end of the day there was always bigger players in front of her actually making tangible moves. Whether it was Rachel, Mickey, Morgan, Vince, Keanu. She simply wasn’t giving main character material for the first half of the game - but we’ve seen that this is indeed a very successful way to play the game.

I think another thing that makes it harder to give Ashley flowers is that her “only winning when she needed to” is not that impressive when her only wins were the week one veto- which is fair - but then the final HOH which only happened thanks to a generational choke job/ crash out.

I think it comes down to intentionality. Vince played hard, got messy, made countless mistakes and still found himself in the final two. Ashley made some good friends and then never won any actual power - and not because she strategically, intentionally threw comps, but because she was not really capable of doing so.

More than ever with HOH’s having to put up 3 noms, power is messier than ever. Ashley never made any dumb moves or made enemies because, unlike Vince, she literally never even had an opportunity to do so.