Oh I actually had Laura pegged as a qualifier from the beginning lol. I definitely felt like she was by far the best choice, and that's with one of the other finalists being a former classmate of mine, lol. Never underestimate the power of upbeat positivity (which is also why I had Zoë, Ieva, Nathan Trent and NAVIband as qualifiers in their respective years although virtually nobody else considered them safe)
Anyway, Belgium just needs a steep kick in the critical analyses. Eliot lost because RTBF completely misread "Wake up" as story-based, rather than rhythm-based. Nobody cares about wake up's crappy generic message. The key change was what defined it, and the one point everybody talked about. Ignoring it completely stripped the song of whichever identity it had left, turning it into a bland mess.