Maybe they expected less considering the vast majority of those games are really short/unfinished and not on huge platforms like Steam. On the other hand, it’s also to be expected that having the chance of official recognition (and possibly even monetization) will drive people to put more effort into them.

As for the rejection rate I’m not sure it’s really that high, they said their plan is to release around 10 games per year so if they get 50 applications at the same time they’ll naturally have to say “hold on a sec” to most of them.