I completely understand. Sports and Art school have made my skin super thick to critiques. There is nothing quite as demoralizing as spending a week on a painting, slightly improving it every day. Then being told at the end of class that you screwed up early on and need to start from scratch after a few weeks of effort. Therefore in the spirit of art school, I will take your criticism and apply it to the next piece i work on. As i am a big fan of starting from scratch to incorporate improvement on a stronger foundation.
Also, its difficult to give constructive feedback when you don't what people's goals are. Which would result in people not having any opinion or response to a specific work. Therefor i realized that people weren't necessarily trying to be polite, they just didn't have a reference model to judge your work against. An example would the host telling us in detail what constitutes a crystal castle. Drugs and Snow flakes can also be perceived as crystals, so who is to say that sniffing and feet in the snow would be elements of a crystal castle. As a result art school critiques were lack luster when the artist didn't state their objective with the piece. Cold reads were the only way to tell the artist "This is what i think your piece is trying to say".