Scores on the voting side are horribly arbitrary. There's also some "snipers" out there who purposefully knock other peoples scores down. But don't let that deter you. My personal style is probably the exact opposite of yours. I tend to paint "clean and cartoony" as opposed to your "gritty and realistic" style. And most of my stuff tends to hover around the 7 point mark as well. Much of it is subjective to personal opinion.
Looking at the piece itself, I like it. If I were to give you the basic critique (and only because you asked) that I think most others would toss your way, it would be this,..
1) push the contrast further: The flesh tones (for example) seem a bit muted. Yes, there is some muscle shading there,.. but if you took the shadow lines darker, and the highlights a bit whiter,.. it would help the piece pop.
2) color palette: You used roughly the same browns on the figure as you did for the trees. A bit of variation in the tones/colors, might help to draw the eye to the central character, instead of letting the eye wander over the entire piece.
3) metals: Your metals could use a bit more tonal variety. They are just sort of one shade of copper, with a black wash over it. Either add some reds/purples/green washes, and then re-glaze the copper color back over to just let a bit of the undertones show through,... or given that this is a wilderness beast, I'd say it's very unlikely that he has bright, shiny new copper axes. Chances are, the would have been scavenged from a battle or something at some point, and over time, the copper would "patina" to a black-ish-brown-ish color, with some blue-green oxidization on it. (google bronze and copper statues to see what I mean)
Hope this helped
