I'm happy to say publicly what I found stressful about Purimgifts, because I don't think it reflects poorly on anyone. I personally found it stressful to create art as well as write, and on top of that I have little knowledge of Jewish culture, and felt nervous about the possibility of saying or showing something dumb. That's too much stress at once.

You can tell someone "Bad art is okay" as clearly and cheerfully as you like, but if their idea of having fun in an exchange does not include making bad art, being told it's okay doesn't help. And although there are free image editing software programs with good tutorials available, sufficient to make bad art, my lack of experience was still a barrier because I wasn't used to thinking up art ideas. That gave extra time pressure. It felt like I was doing several assignments at once: coming up with one (or more) story ideas that felt worth producing as an idea; coming up with one or more art ideas; learning my way around the image manipulation or hosting requirements of my art ideas (filters? Creative Commons? eep); trying to figure out the balance between having, say, no Jewish culture content, which at least was permissible, and between trying to use my participation in the fest to learn something more about Judaism & Jewish culture and incorporate it in a thoughtful way. Oh, and possibly canon review. For possibly several different canons.

Were some of those stresses self-imposed and to too high standards? Absolutely.

The schedule isn't a problem; all the factors I mention existing in parallel is. So, I don't think I'll take part in future years, but I don't think anything about the exchange ought to change. And in fact, having fewer exchanges to tempt me, personally, is no bad thing. ^^;