[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> 1. Cutting-edge academic research (do better on this test set)

It's interesting you put it this way. I think most machine learning researchers who aspire to do "cutting-edge" research would prefer to be the first one to do well on a new dataset, rather than push the needle forward by 0.005 on an old dataset that everyone else has already had a ball with. Or at the very least, they'd prefer to do significantly better than everyone else on that old dataset.

I bet you remember the names of the guys who pushed the accuracy on ImageNet up by ~11%, but not the names of the few thousand people who have since improved results by tiny little amounts.