for the purpose of providing proof of work, unfortunately yes.
there is a whole lot of absolutely incredible art, photography, music and video out there, and our mods are not all expert enough to judge the amount of time went in to judging each piece, altho they do take it into account.
The mods are volunteers, and do not have the time to watch every 3-5 minute audio or video clip in order to judge for quality and input, as well as search for possible plagiarism. They cannot glance at a photo and see how long it took the photographer to hike up the trail and wait until the sun was just so.
Therefore we must rely on the word count and detail to illustrate the input. I'm not sure about you, but it takes me about ten minutes to write 100 words. Yes its on top of the hours you took to create your art. We do take that into consideration.