Um, you might not know this but that image is far from low-rez. It's 1028 by 768, composed of 12 individual texture squares of 256x256 in size. That's the one and ONLY way to make wallpaper for UT.
The background is purposely blurred to soften it's effect on the background. I sent several samples to Holger and we both agreed that the soft background looked best. Well we might offer a choise of several backgrounds in the future, I happen to really like the background I made and I think it's very approperate.
As far as the background contest, that didn't work out very well. I was hoping for something much better then the background I already had lined up. None of the entries I received matched it's quality or exceeded it. There were 1 or 2 that were close, but they just didn't have the polish I was hoping for.