well in this battle we were all encouraged to submit late, so i wouldn't take it as indicative of anything. it's supposed to be a bit of fun, not seriously competitive.
if you want to take as much time as you want on an entry, just enter majors.
At this point, I'd literally always come before others by submitting an almost empty entry, 5 minutes into an 1 hour battle, compared to a carefully crafted piece that's being submitted 5 or 10 minutes late.
while i have a lot of sympathy for you (as a serial latist myself) i gotta say - don't you think other people cut ideas they'd hoped to develop in order to get their entries in on time? everyone would like an extra 10 minutes to polish their work to perfection - but then we'd just have 70-minute battles, and we'd be complaining that they're not 80 minutes.
you may just have to start killing your darlings, or live like me and eat the late penalty every time as the fee you gladly pay for submitting something you're 10% more more satisfied with.
At the very least, imo, the battle host should be able decide each time how much the late penalty values (e.g. x1, x0.5, x0.25, etc.).
battle hosts actually can disable late penalties, at the cost of many boons.