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I can't even remember what order I put the short stories in, except that I didn't much like If You Were a Dinosaur..., and didn't think it was genre.
Checking my records, I went:
1. The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere
2. The Ink Readers of Doi Saket
3. Selkie Stories are for Losers
4. If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love
I seem to feel that the short shorts haven't been great for years. Maybe I'm not remembering very well. The split between Short Story and Novelette seems like arbitrary nonsense to me, but I can understand why it is practical to have more short categories, since it's easy for everyone to read all the nominees. The same reason it's impractical to have a Best Series award.
The best way to evaluate an award, in my opinion, is to look at its track-record and see what it got right and what it got wrong. The Hugo does pretty well, with most of the big tentpole books covered: Dune, Neuromancer, Ringworld, Starship Trooper, Gateway, Ender's Game, etc. It has a populist slant, and will pick a good story over a literary gem, but there's nothing hugely wrong with that. The other big SF awards have been more likely to come up with a book I dislike, but lately I don't think the Hugo's Novel shortlists have compared favourably at all.
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