I would contend that it’s not a lack of creativity but it’s people following the model and spirit of class 1. Class 1 is supposed to be in “traditional” style. So bikes are going to be stock frames, and cobbled together using “stock” parts from various brands, styles, and period bikes. It’s like putting together a bike like a puzzle to build your vision and or style. Class 1 is the average joe, with average skills, average tools, and average budgets. You see a lot of resto’s of stock bikes which is cool but it won’t win many votes because people are looking for the wild, pushing the limit builds, which in my opinion is class 2. Most people in class 1 are building bikes from their parts lying around their garage and bolting it on. Can you do a class 1, be creative, wild paint job, etc? Of course! In the car world class 1 and class 2 is like stock vs modified. Stock cars are going to look like mustangs and camaros because that’s exactly what they are, they have stock motors that average joe can aquire. Modified starts seeing crazy body mods, blower motors and so on. The reason class 1 bikes look similar ish is because they are following preset parameters. Bolt on is rat on my opinion, that’s how we customized our bikes back in the day. Every year the class 1 bikes with a majority of the votes are ones that border on class 2 IMO. Theoretically at this point someone could make a bracket and bolt a stock bike to the back of car and call it class 1. It’s bolt on. Regardless of class there wasn’t a single bike I didn’t like this year. But I don’t think class 1 lacked creativity by any stretch. Congrats to all the builders this year!