I participated for the first time. I offered and requested both ships and individual characters, usually mixed. I received a ship and a character focused gift. I wrote 4 ship and 2 character based works.

For me the ship option just made it easier to specify what I wanted and offer to the right people. I would often request both the character that interested me and one or two ships with them. To me this is the equivalent of requesting a character and writing "If you feel so inclined, I ship them with X and Y" in my prompt/letter - except easier to process.

I don't know if (as many people have said) the relationship option is really sending the wrong messages and the event got more shippy than before?

Edit:

As for finding people to treat with character based fics and that being muddled by ships..
https://autoao3app.firebaseapp.com allows to specifically look only for character requests if you type in !Ship: in the Character field you get 1184 requests out of 1633. Those are all requests with at least one non-ship character.

And about reveals, for Europeans who have to get up early in the morning, the reveals were too late. I understand you can't make everyone happy and Australians might complain too.