Freezing, IMHO, is a terrible option. As it stands, whoever manages to get first look at the submissions has the power to stop anyone from ever seeing certain ones. It’s worse than the primaries.

A few tools with no sense of humor/no clue/a personal agenda can downvote out interesting options early on, leaving only crap to look at… but at least the community as a whole now has the option to also downvote the remaining garbage later on, and avoid a forced crappy selection. Freezing the “winner” after the first handful of folks to check in have downvoted everything is just sort of a crap shoot to see which item gets downvoted last. There needs to be a better solution – even a better short term solution.