[na85]

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.

[burnthrow]

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.

[na85]

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

[hackart]

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