I watched a bunch of new submissions today, in all of them the author said that it was their first animation, be nice, sorry its short yada yada... I then realised that I did a similar thing with my flash submission... hmmm... My bad...
There's nothing wrong with everyone saying its their first submission, and first time their putting their work up to the scrutiny of the NG community, it's just lame how many people use it in an attempt to make excuses for what are plainly just bad animations, or what they're trying to pass off as animations...