I think the story was more or less decently written, hence the characters, or at least the MC and a couple of others, are fleshed out just enough to make them believable, with a bit of biographical depth. The context and world building could have worked better, I thought, but were never really fleshed out or pursued further.
However I was also left wondering about this one being nominated.
Since no one has said so thus far, I wonder if some of those who really enjoyed it or felt emotionally drawn to it weren't reacting in part to the narrator's tone, inflection, etc. She does a good job of putting emotion into it. Having said that, for the first half, as I tried to imagine this tough captain-lady, the narrator's tone just felt too nice - at one point I almost thought it made it sound like YA fiction. But then as the story unfolds and the MC turns out to be rather incapable of taking decisive action that part of the narrating felt perhaps more in line with the story.
One last thought re:
I can appreciate the need for a more communal society when resources are limited. Unfortunately, even in a communal society someone has to be in charge of deciding allotments of resources. When an entire society comes to depend on a centralized controlling entity for its existence then corruption, favoritism and despotism often occurs.
This story presents a somewhat favorable view of a communal society, but it is only a story. In reality, when someone has the courage to expose corruption of public officials in such collective regimes, they are the ones often punished.
Although it is easy to forget, our purportedly globalised planet is currently home to over 4,000 different language communities (yes, that's languages, not "dialects"), comprising thousands of distinct cultural and ethnic groups, not to mention ways of understanding and ordering their particular worlds. In a substantial majority of these groups individualism of the kind you describe is virtually nonexistent; indeed it is antithetical to how people conceive their life-worlds, which is mostly as networks of relations and interdependent institutions. To reduce communalism, as is so often the case in the Cold War and post-Cold War Euroamerican imagination, to a caricature of failed socialist/communist utopias really speaks volumes to our own cultural limitations than to anything else.
Sorry, that all sounds like a rant, and maybe it is, but this touched a raw nerve since I have spent the past 15 years carrying out in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in societies of Oceania and Inner Asia that are profoundly communal, demographically insignificant and in most cases deeply isolated. Communal distribution and ownership in these places makes total sense and is anything but abusive. Moreover, what these peoples can teach us -in their own peculiar ways- about conflict resolution and survival in the most unlikely environmental and historical circumstances would, I think, leave many of us wondering whether it's out of a SF setting.
Yes, I exaggerate slightly, but much of what I say here is true.