The act of deciding to create music should come from within: not be something subject to approval from outside entities - as long as it rewards the creator.
Anyway, I posted a long, and admittedly highly subjective, critique on pianoworld, which for the sake of discussion I will repeat here.
Beforehand I'll comment a) that I definitely preferred your earlier D min concerto b) that is good research, Ted: it explains a lot of what I feel about the sonic limitations. The waveform is quite clearly clipped - and substantially so.
I listened to the full piece. First impressions: the sound quality suffers from a lack of clarity: individual parts don't seem to come out (or perhaps they aren't very well delineated). That's not my biggest concern. There doesn't seem to be a lot of dialogue between the piano and the orchestra, with the net result that the listener thinks the same thing is happening over and over again. It would not hurt, to have a big statement of the theme in the piano, in chords for example: and without the scalic figures in the background - they really are overused. The other problem is that there don't seem to be a lot of standout points which focus attention. I think these concerns are ultimately exacerbated by the sound, which is very one-dimensional.
Second impressions (quick running commentary):
The very first bars I find the harmony/intervalic superimpositions rather antithetical to the romantic idiom. Not sure if this is me or not, but they don't seem to fit.
0.23: these octaves are far too slow and not bravura enough and lose the impetus of the quasi-cadenza passage beforehand.
0:42: I like the basic idea, but as with the introduction I think a slightly thinner harmonic texture might benefit it: I'm a bit troubled by some of the non-harmonically essential intervals within the texture.
c.1:42: by now I think most listeners will be thinking "this has been saying the same thing for quite a while". I don't think this works on a dramatic level, quite apart from musical or structural.
2:10: No! The octaves have prepared the listener for the piano to do something quite dramatic, and it goes back to doing basically what it was doing before. A big chordal statement (see above) would imo work better.
2:50-3.01: I think this lead-in works quite well.
4:27: There was real impetus in that progession I felt, and then it just stopped! What followed is in places quite touching, but with better organisation, you could achieve both that and get something from 4:21-7's progression.
5:46 decent join imo. The drum roll helps add colour.
Good coda.
I might be quite critical, but at the same time I also appreciate just how much work will have gone into this.
Addendum: giving up is the last thing you should be doing!