I think that's the difference, very few people in the batch thread test their chips with Prime95 for 1 hour. Stability difference between SPi 32M and Prime95 is pretty big.
Last year was pretty similar, it was just separate qualifier for each regions.
1 spot is will be randomly given to anybody who made it in the top 20 and did not qualify, 1 lucky spot for 12 people is not too bad.