I'm also in a few local leaderboards, but I'm not "really" competing, it's more of a fun group thing.

Premises:

(i) I love Advent of Code and I'm grateful for its continuing existence in whatever form its creators feel like it's best for themselves and the community;

(ii) none of what follows is a request, let alone a demand, for anything to change;

(iii) what follows is just the opinion of some random guy on the Internet.

I have a lot of experience with competitions (although more on the math side than on the programming side), and I've been involved essentially since I was in high school, as a contestant, coach, problem writer, organizer, moving tables, etc. In my opinion Advent of Code simply isn't a good competition:

- You need to be available for many days in a row for 15 minutes at a very specific time.

- The problems are too easy.

- There is no time/memory check: you can write ooga-booga code and still pass.

- Some problems require weird parsing.

- Some problems are pure implementation challenges.

- The AoC guy loves recursive descent parsers way too much.

- A lot of problems are underspecified (you can make assumptions not in the problem statement).

- Some problems require manual input inspection.

To reiterate once again: I am not saying that any of this needs to change. Many of the things that make Advent of Code a bad competition are what make it an excellent, fun, memorable "Christmas group thing". Coming back every day creates community and gives people time to discuss the problems. Problems being easy and not requiring specific time complexities to be accepted make the event accessible. Problems not being straight algorithmic challenges add welcome variety.

I like doing competitions but Advent of Code has always felt more like a cozy problem solving festival, I never cared too much for the competitive aspect, local or global.

There are definitely some problems that have an indirect time/memory check, in that if you don't have a right-enough algorithm, your program will never finish.

I too like the simple nature. If you care about highly performant code, you can always challenge yourself (I got into measuring timing in the second season I participated). Personally I prefer a world like this. Not everyone should have to compete on every detail (I know you stated that your points aren’t demands, I’m just pointing out my own worldview). For any given thing, there will naturally be people that are OK with “good enough”, and people who are interested to take it as far as they can. It’s nice that we can all still participate in this.

One could probably build a separate service that provides a leaderboard for solution runtimes.

I agree that it’s more of a cozy activity than a hardcore competition, that’s what I appreciate about it most.

Do you know of anything like AoC but that feels less contrived? I often spend the most time understanding the problem requirements because they are so arbitrary - like the worst kind of boardgame! Maybe I should go pick up some OSS tickets...