Were they the only team that did autonomous programming skills? They are two sets, lots of teams run driver skills and not the auto skills.
There are rubrics / descriptions for all the awards, we get judges to follow all of them, and don’t have a problem. You will find “unstacking” so the team that wins Excellence, may/may not win Design/STEM. Winners of Design / may/may not win other judged awards.
I’d suggest talking to the EP of the event, most of us are forthcoming on how the judged awards went down.