So having had some time to mull over the designs and read the club's rationale, I think committing to the final vote is what's hamstrung the process.
When you're presenting 3 final options for any kind of survey, they have to be functionally identical - unlike the various very distinctive (and let's be honest, better) efforts that fans have come up with. That's why the font's the same, the laurels are the same, and every one includes that ridiculous Fisher Price "Everton" - which fans have agreed is important rather than clamouring for, presumably because someone somewhere has decided it's necessary to broadcast Everton to the world.
If there were one badge with an awful shield but the best tower, and another with beautiful wreaths but "ebepton" scrawled in Comic Sans, people would start wanting to mix and match. In an iterative process where you can go back to the same people once or twice a week that's great, but when you're polling 20k fans and need a final answer, leaving too many variables open just undermines the sense of consultation. If the winning design got messed about with to accommodate responses that fell beyond "that one, please", no one would end up happy and the whole thing would have been an exercise in the club shooting itself in the foot.
So yeah, we've got 3 options which are basically variations upon the same thing, but given the constraints - specifically, giving fans the casting vote - they've actually come up with something pretty good.
As long as the first one wins, obviously.
