More fundamentally, ARC is for abstract reasoning. Moving blocks around on a grid. While in theory there is some overlap with SWE tasks, what I really care about is competence on the specific task I will ask it to do. That requires a lot of domain knowledge.

As an analogy, Terence Tao may be one of the smartest people alive now, but IQ alone isn’t enough to do a job with no domain-specific training.