This process won praise from the open cryptographic community, and helped to increase confidence in the security of the winning algorithm from those who were suspicious of backdoors in the predecessor, DES.
Like DES, this was to be "an unclassified, publicly disclosed encryption algorithm capable of protecting sensitive government information well into the next century.
Interest from the open cryptographic community was immediately intense, and NIST received a great many submissions during the three-month comment period.
In the ensuing debate, many advantages and disadvantages of the candidates were investigated by cryptographers; they were assessed not only on security, but also on performance in a variety of settings (PCs of various architectures, smart cards, hardware implementations) and on their feasibility in limited environments (smart cards with very limited memory, low gate count implementations, FPGAs).
Bruce Schneier, one of the authors of the losing Twofish algorithm, wrote after the competition was over that "I have nothing but good things to say about NIST and the AES process.