Last time I competed in MBN we cooked 9 whole shoulders (1 too many, but they came 3 to a case and that 9th one was basically free) and 14 racks of BB's. We didnt even enter the whole hog category. MBN is cool in that you can compete for GC/RGC by just entering 1 of the 3. But seriously, whole shoulders vs. butts, right there is almost twice the meat cost in shoulders. I love the on-site as a judge, but as a competitor... Ugh. I really like the finals, both as a competitor and a judge. All of this just adds to the cost and the effort involved.
It's tough. Perhaps unnecessarily so.