I've seen very low quality submissions in the /new queue. Basically a single sentence, no information about team, no contact information in the profiles and no upvotes either. Looking through the 300 submission in the /applyhn queue I can't find an example so they could have been filtered already or flagged at one point or another. With more than one submission I thought "you have 2000(?) characters to present, why didn't you invest some time?", again I see that as low quality, not trolling.
Since "Apply HN" is for fellowships and the idea of fellowships is that the business is not necessarily ready to go into business mode, I'm not sure that application polish is an ideal metric. It measures application quality rather than something more meaningful like potential impact multiplied by potential execution.
