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Not only that but adventofcode seems to leverage purposely-obtuse input formatting as an artificial difficulty enhancement.

I stopped doing advent this year when I realized I was spending more time debugging my parsing than I was actually solving the problems. It's just not that fun for me to sometimes spend 2+ hours finding parse bugs before moving on to the actual puzzle.

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The puzzles aren't fun at all. Like you said, they're basically "write a parser + complete a tedious word problem." They require substantial time investment for little creative reward, it's basically masochism.

Perl Advent Calendar is my jam.

I dunno, some of them are fun. The ship navigation one this year was fun to solve, as was the gameboy emulator one.

This is my first year attempting adventofcode. But doing other things mentioned in this discussion would have been better use of time.

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