I also had to use a dark background colour and this allowed me arrange the shapes to support the flames in a way that connected the flames along a pipeline.
for entry #1 - I often see obvious designs in the business world. My design looks for new and unexplored ideas to really give the viewing public an opportunity to look twice. To ask a viewer to look deeper beyond what is the norm and expected is something of a rarity in many designs today. If enlisted into public domain the design is given time to grow on the viewer and actually embed itself solidly into the memory sometimes more so than a competing business.
Many companies fear that putting that expected reasoning in jeapardy is not for them.. fair enough opinion I say, but some of the best and biggest have logos that are unexpected in reasoning.