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It would be sacrilege to exclude Twisted Metal

Ah, this was lovely. A decidedly delicate feeling with tuned percussion, some acoustics, and female vocals (for which I is a sucker.) If I may wax poetic for a moment, your approach captures the more magical side of Terra, along with all the wonder, mystique, and awe. The vocals give me serious Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess vibes, and the acoustic guitar and percussion remind me a bit of timaeus222's Progressive Memory (which is a great song on the sight, I highly recommend it.) Frankly, I think my only complaint is that isn't longer. At the same time, that short sweetness... Nice work, nice work.

Oh snap, I didn't realize that I still had more time! I threw something together last-minute and sent it in just in case there's still time left. It's definitely going to sound rushed and under-developed, but it's better than nothing! haha

I refuse to believe professionally made "budget" libraries suck, especially since musicians are more than well known for being zealous about sound quality, since the chaotic nature of composing, arranging and producing eventually mandates that songs will require "that" kind of sound that could be anywhere in anything. I routinely have to deny top-quality samples and instruments in the tracks I'm working on simply because they don't work or flow inside the track I'm working on - this is why I still keep almost ALL the extremely outdated soundfonts and VSTs I had before I got good at this. Sometimes I still need a shitty flute or violin or choir AH sample because that's what turned out to fit the spot I needed filled in. Funny Yoozer mentioned the ancient Roland orchestral card. A few months ago I bought the Roland SRX-06 card so I could have access to the Final Fantasy Tactics and Zelda 64 sounds as needed for my ambitions.

I would've given something precious to have that piano sound 30 years ago. For ensembles, consider layering real strings with synth strings. It's an art to achieve that, however - not everything will work. As for the rest - do consider you're setting very high standards for yourself. For fun, check out http://www.synthmania.com/sr-jv80-02.htm - then you'll hear how much better you have it nowadays. That doesn't mean you shouldn't upgrade - putting the bar higher for yourself is a good thing - but it's easy to get lost in buying things. Buying things won't make you a better musician or composer. Even with more expensive libraries, adding (and considering!) the kind of realism @Garpocalypse mentions is necessary.

Velocity and timing go a long way towards making an authentic sounding performance so don't overlook that. The best sample libraries take the attack of each instrument into account whereas the cheaper libraries often have 0ms of attack across all of their samples. i.e. you hit a note and get the result immediately without any startup. Take your bass pizzicato's for example. They are RIGHT ON THE BEAT which does not work well with an emotive piece of music like this. A bassist has to anticipate the moment that the string has to be released in order to come in at the right time which means he has to take the physics of his own instrument into account as well as playing off of the emotion present at the moment in the music in order to sound appropriate. There's anticipation and some hesitation there with every pluck and your sequencing needs to reflect this. If you think you can put static midi into a better sample library and have it come out the way you want you are going to be sorely disappointed. It's more along the lines of the better the sample library the more time you will need to spend detailing each instrument which WILL take hours and hours to get as authentic as possible. I would stay far away from symphobia if you want any sort of flexibility. IMO it's overpriced for what it is and you would be far better off with the older East West QL Symphonic Orchestra which you can pick up on the (relatively)cheap these days if you time it right. http://www.soundsonline.com/symphonic-orchestra

You get around it by focusing on composition, arranging and mixing. Video game composer professionals have had to work with mediocre samples or worse for 20 years and that's still the most beloved era of videogame music, so sample quality is almost sort of a given that it's not what makes the quality of a song most of the time.