So my point is not an anti-critique rant but this: relying solely on critique means you won't know about a pothole until either you or someone you're watching drives over it. There are other ways to learn to drive besides mapping the bumps in the road.
I posted the above after you posted this. I also agree with that.
Let me tell you a bit of my own history in the contest and general writing regarding this.
Before I entered a contest, I was in a writing frenzy, but on long form only, as I was reading only novels (many very long, like Deed of Paksenarrion ombnibus, Night Angel, Farseer, Game of Thrones, etc).
So the switch from long form (150k+ words) to short form (1500 words) was quite shocking, to say the least.
That first contest I entered had a critique thread, but not the next ones. It took me 2-3 months to discover they were totally optional, someone had to open it. If there was interest.
Sure, now being veterans we know anyone can open the thread, but just like with
@AFrasier this month, it will would be pretty hard to discover that as a newbie who just joined, let alone be the who would open it
Specially if you don't really know the mood of the place as I believe most of us already deal with lots of problems daily and could do without more destructive feedback at night on the Internet

Anyway, with time and reading books/articles on writing + reading novels with a more critical eye we can all improve, I found that reviewing helped me a lot too. But I was still too entrenched on long form and couldn't notice it.
But like you said, what changed my mindset was curiously not a long, detailed critique, but a random comment months ago on a Discussion or Voting thread (I'm pretty sure it was from
@ScarletBea - between, thanks Bea, that changed everything

), something like: "Some stories are very creative, but I tend to like more stories with a clear beginning/middle/end."
Boom, took months or half a year to realize my stories had no such structure. Because I was still in the mindset of long form, so I was not writing stories. I was writing chapters.
But people couldn't go back to read the "fascinating" beginning nor advance forward for the "explosive" conclusion. I guess people still did like a lot of concepts and situations, but left unsatisfied.
Then I consciously started doing things differently. Like you said, "knowing what you should do before you start." But couldn't that also have come from a critique?
Anyway, more important, the experience gained with the practice over a year was so huge. 1500 words are like 6 manuscript pages. Managing to put beginning, middle, conclusion, with proper conflict, foreshadow, plot twists, characterization, etc in such space was invaluable. Meaning I could even analyze my own work through blocks of 5 pages and see what they had in them.
That said, I just tossed the whole previous work out of the window, as it was too messy and was easier to just start again

But as Malcolm Gladwell and the 10k hours theory say, even Mozart and the Beatles started by sucking, then learned how not to suck
