> merely a student or professor, but can get a job at or create their own a startup or big company or meaningful open source project of their own.
Hey! Professors do meaningful things too :)
> The real downfall of icfp is that in the past 10 years, anyone talented enough to participate
I don't think the optimization is the biggest problem. If you look at it, Endo in 2007 was "optimization", you had to find the shortest prefix to save our alien friend. But the problem had more meat to it and it was different from the problems that came before.
People are no different today than 10-20 years ago, and more good young people are created all the time who can participate. If anything, there are way more capable people that can participate today than 20 years ago.
The problems are now all the same. Why would you waste your time doing this year's problem when the problem from last year is nearly identical but with a different two-paragraph lead-in story.
Regardless of our diagnosis, the numbers bear out that the ICFP contest is slowly dying. The number of teams submitting from 2014 to 2018: 275, 230, 203, 120, 107.
We have a few more years before it's scrapped at this rate.