Thanks for good input, everyone. And thank you for the kind offer, @Jackswift . We’ll keep it simple for the time being, but I’ll keep your proposal in mind if we wish to try it out later.
Including craftsman entries such as forging, wood carving, clay sculpting, knitting or what have you, would be a natural for a hybrid Artisan’s. Most entries would as a rule be miniature, but it also opens up for art and crafts. There is untapped potential in crafts.
Given the limited contest slots in a year, and the wish to keep contests useful for people’s armies and terrain collections, the idea with going hybrid for Artisan’s Contest would be to open up for both art and crafts entries without taking away miniature painting opportunities.
I’m sure we’d get a good number of entries in a focused crafts competition just as we’ve got for focused art competitions in the past, but going hybrid would mean that craft entries would be welcome on more contest occasions than just once in a good while.
Speaking of rare contest occasions, we’ve yet to have a music Artisan’s Contest (as in audio, not just written song lyrics). That one has been on my to-do-list for eight years now, but I’m still not sure if any people would enter if we tried one out. And I need to learn where to upload audio files, and what file types would work.
We could run hybrid Artisan’s Contests as an experiment over next year and see how it pans out. Best case, it opens up for some wacky oddball creations we otherwise would not get to see. Worst case, voting gets skewed and we drop hybrids, returning instead to yearly dedicated art & crafts competitions.
As to no conversions in Golden Hat, experience from following CDO’s established contest model (and then modifying it) has taught me that the desire for fairness across the board tends to introduce unnecessary restrictions. For instance, we once had restrictions on base size, which did create friction for a previous artillery contest (before I started running competitions in 2014). An excellent member of CDO quit over it.
But more to the point, we want to encourage the creation of beautiful things, not hamper them. The most we could hope for, is that people bring some marvellous photos to a contest, of converted and painted miniatures in a diorama complete with background and scenery, that becomes a classic display picture pulling more people into the Chaos Dwarf niche by force of sheer gorgeousness and wow-factor.
I’ve never stopped tinkering with the contests since taking up those reins, so trying out hybrid ACs is business as usual from my point of view. Let’s see how it works out. 
Member feedback has helped steer many modifications. For instance, advice from @Skink made us shift gear from niche themes to broader contest themes which would be useful for anyone building up an army.
Cheers
