“(I'm mainly making statements of fact, with a perhaps-unavoidable touch of opinion. I want to avoid spoiling the pot before we get more entries and/or the contest deadline, so don't read between my lines too much.)”
I wouldn't :) Until you had written this line, I had actually totally forgotten that you were a judge. I can help you with the deadline though : "*Time:* The competition will run from now until midday GMT June 1st "
Globally, not a lot of questions in this post, as you've said it's mainly statements, I'll just answer this
“Of course, this game sounds like those, but there is also the perception that it is on a much, much larger scale, maybe along the lines of Oblivion.”
Yes, this is totally a source of inspiration. I expected a lot from the Radiant IA thing and was quite saddened to see that NPCs did not even reach the intelligence of an average Sim. So I thought that with hardware from the future, modest requirements in the rest of the game, and years of development hell, it could be possible to just do large-scale IA simulation that looks and works better, and use it more throughout the game instead of just making it a spec (as an example, I thought that a sophisticated rumor propagation system with information alteration, propagation delays, and an ability to kill the messenger, could offer very interesting in-game results).
Neolander added on
(PS : Althought you found lots of sources of inspirations, even some which I didn't thought about, I'd add the Shadowrun tabletop RPG game, as a source of inspiration for the universe)