I don't see what you mean by "the difference between hashes won't tell you how close you are" .... isn't that the whole point of this competition?

Say for instance you coded four stages:

1/ Generating a list of strings for analysis 2/ Parsing that list for sentences that made sense 3/ Hashing these sentences 4/ Comparing the hashes generated with the one being sought

to me it just looked as though a lot of gibberish was analysed because there is a lot more entropy than order to sift through and nobody tried step 2... does my logic make sense or am I getting mixed up and not really seeing the bigger picture?