My hot take is that play development conference asking writers about their developmental goals for the play is a bad practice and they should stop doing it.

Since these selections processes take at least nine months, it’s very unlikely that the play has been frozen in amber and that the goals would be the same by the time it was in the conference as the time of application. So:

What these are actually asking for is to gauge the writers ability to articulate what is not working in their play and see if it lines up with what the evaluator thinks is not working.

So you have taken what is already an incredibly subjective thing - evaluating the merit of a play - and overlayed on it a second even MORE subjective evaluative process that doesn’t necessarily correlate in any way to the ability to revise a play.

Tl;dr: Development Goals mostly function to provide post-facto evidence to support whatever the reader’s gut instinct was. They get you farther away from evaluating a play, not closer.