I haven't been to OCR for a long time. I used to be a mod and a judge there (as well as a remixer, obviously). Maybe I banned you? I hope so. 
Anyway please explain the "gear" fetish a little more if you can, I'm curious as to what that is all about. I know they rejected my Ecco tunage because they felt it was "too short" at 3.5 minutes long.
I did submit a few things to VGMIX as well, but that site quickly went away. Virt went apeshit on OCR one day and a bunch of people left. Fun times.
Actually OCR was one of the places I never got banned at, mostly because I never stepped out of the Remixing 101 forums, and never posted much at all really.
Anyway, the gear fetish is mainly that they don't accept remixes unless it sounds like the newest, hottest shit on the market. This makes the remixes a lot of trance and a lot of orchestral. I have not experienced this previously, as I have never actually submitted anything to them. Also if you get on DJ Pretzel's good side, you can bypass the judge's panel, which is just wrong. OCR is the Catholic Church of the game remixing world. (I'm sorry if that offended anyone, but it has to be said).
The newer remixes have great aural quality, but are not very catchy or memorable. That's WAAAY different when OCR was pretty much brand new (and just got featured in EGM), when 90% of the mixes were catchy, and there was just a fun vibe there. Now it just seems pretentious.
