How does anyone get enough work for a day of compute time, much less any badge at all? If people are stealing all the WUs to fill up their caches, they are preventing anyone else from contributing. Isn't there some way to control this?

If? IF? There are no 'ifs.' Its happening. When we got that last big round of C's, I removed my HCCC and ran just DDDT2, but kept my cashe low. as in half a day. (stupid me)
And I racked up about 7 pages worth of 'pending validation.' I don't remember exactly when all those WUs came through, but my pendings are STILL clearing... 2 and a half to 3 pages worth to go
(for those of you doing the math at home, its 20 (edit. wasn't thinking. Its actually 15) results per page)
I'll get a Bronze soon enough, I figure 1, maybe 2 stats updates, but its insane that its taking this long to validate everything. I've never had backlog problems on the WCG on this scale.

Edit - Checked results status. Got a nice surprise... Down to 2 pages of pendings. All of them sitting there for 4-5 days. I expect a few to error, not report back, etc but this just seems worse than average. No way I'm the only person in this boat.

Good catch. 15. I'll make the change now.
Its still ridiculous.

Ah yes, just forgot to mention, I got the Bronze badge today.
It is strange, I should be doing somersaults, but due to the extremely intermittent behaviour of the project and the totally erratic behaving of the WU's I simply pulled out of the race.

OK. It is nice to have that badge

Stealing? really? Stealing???