Well, I'm going to give just my personal opinions on the final submissions.
Larto: The first verse was off-beat for quite some time. After that the timing was perfect, but what happened here? Every time you sang a relatively high note, your voice just kind of dropped off, like it was dying out. It contradicts the emotion that the song was trying to convey at that point, aside from just sounding weird. There were a lot of incorrect individual notes, but they were very slightly so to the point that they don't really detract from the song. The major problems are the complete lack of power behind your high notes and the very weak opening. Unfortunately the high points happened throughout the song and made it appear weak overall.
Sweagen: You chose a song which goes well with your lack of editing timing(relatively). I think that if you properly edited the vocal track, this would sound a lot better. It has nothing against your singing ability, but rather that you didn't properly edit the vocal track to match the background. I do notice that you include a secondary vocal track, which helps accentuate the point at which you use it. It's not very effective though, given the fact that the entire track is slightly off-beat, just enough so that it's irritating. Your secondary voices also have a habit of sounding ridiculous. Very, very ridiculous. The original track didn't make them sound ridiculous, it sounded very believable instead. On the other hand, you have no idea how jealous I am of your full-voice range. I'm a Bass II, and my maximum full-voice range caps out at about G above middle C, which is pretty horrible for singing popular songs. Your pitch is phenomenal though. I think that if the secondary voices sounded more like the original, and if they were on-time, this would be an A+-class recording.
For criticism of myself: The vibrato, I can't control it well enough. Aside from the obvious issues with my $12 microphone (which I believe, is supposed to be irrelevant to judging), the issues boil down to my vibrato, and the fact that I overuse a crescendo throughout a phrase several times. I believe my pitch and timing are both spot-on. A gradual overall crescendo throughout the song emphasizes how the emotions of the singer grow with each verse. Unfortunately the microphone doesn't convey this very well. I also didn't put enough emotion into the first two verses. That would have tremendously improved how the song sounded. The hetfield-like endings to phrases worked out very well though.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I think that sweagen's round 3 submission was, vocally, the best thus far. If it was on-time with the song, that is. I wish I had that range. I do journey at karaoke sometimes, but I do it an octave down.