Thanks Owen,
We did look into the alternatives in the blog and we use some of those tools in other, larger projects.
The ease of use of the Story Map Crowdsource is what is so attractive for us. It is a little 1 month project that we cannot dedicate a ton of time to not knowing whether or not it will be a hit. (we are encouraging our citizens to post their holiday decor) Having one screen to both submit and see the results is key to participation.
The old Story Map Crowdsource allowed for a simple fast deployment with a nice packaged result.