I'm curious what people's experience has been who submitted last year.  I'd love to end up as a finalist, but one of the big reason I entered the contest was because I was hoping for some constructive feedback.  Did people get much feedback about their games?

You're not going to get feedback from the judges. That's what submitting here for playtest is for. :)

No feedback whatsoever

We did a closed beta phase, in which we invited many friends (with an Xbox console and a Creators account) to participate. We did this like three month before the DBP deadline. Their feedback was really helpful, and we ended up including many of the features they were suggesting.

That's really unfortunate.

I think they had >300 entries last year and its probably the same this year. Lets say it takes 30 minutes to play each game enough even for basic fedback and thats 150 hours or almost 4 man weeks of time. I'd rather they fixed bugs and released new versions myself.

Upload your game to playtest if you haven't already - you got a premium membership for submitting. There's lots of people who will let you know what they think.

The ZMan:

Upload your game to playtest if you haven't already - you got a premium membership for submitting. There's lots of people who will let you know what they think.

Aren't those limited-premium memberships you get for entering DBP? I have some friends who use the limited-premium accounts they got from my old university, and they told me those account let you deploy ccgame files to xbox, but don't let you playtest/review, which goes hand in hand with not being able to submit to the actual marketplace.

Stegersaurus Games:

The ZMan:

Upload your game to playtest if you haven't already - you got a premium membership for submitting. There's lots of people who will let you know what they think.

Aren't those limited-premium memberships you get for entering DBP? I have some friends who use the limited-premium accounts they got from my old university, and they told me those account let you deploy ccgame files to xbox, but don't let you playtest/review, which goes hand in hand with not being able to submit to the actual marketplace.

For registering you get a trial. For submitting you should have gotten a free 4 month premium subscription.

Well, I submitted my game on time with all the correct information. Looking at the gallery for the submitted games:
http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/Gallery.aspx

I can't even find it.

So overall, I don't really know why I bothered when you don't even get the courtesy of an automated email saying your entry failed to match whatever criteria they wanted or that you didn't make the top 20.

If you're not seeing your entry in the gallery then that means some error occurred during the submission process and they didn't even know you HAD submitted. That's something that you should have spotted and figured out before the closing of contest entry. Several people had some issues submitting their games but they noticed and got it all straightened out before the deadline.

Bummer your game didn't make it in time for the contest, but there's XBLIG you could submit too and there are other contests you could enter as well. Best of luck to you!