[schoen]

In its original context, this puzzle was part of the 2013 Mystery Hunt which was being solved in real time during a single weekend by numerous large teams (and included about 200 different puzzles, of which this was just one). Those teams were all very familiar with the convention that every puzzle must solve to a word or phrase, and that this typically requires finding the appropriate "extraction".

Teams could "call in" their proposed answers and quickly be told whether they were correct. (At that time that was done partly over the telephone; now it's normally done automatically by a web site, with some kind of rate limiting on guesses.)

There's still a question of whether a particular extraction is good or bad, whether a particular answer is thematic, and whether the answer feels contrived. But for the originally intended audience, the extraction step was fully expected.

(I was on one of the teams that solved this in 2013, and in fact we had written the 2012 Mystery Hunt which the Manic Sages won in order to win the right to organize the 2013 event.)

Here are a few links to materials that try to explain this genre of puzzle events and some of the things that people might expect and might try:

https://puzzles.mit.edu/resources.html

It's understandable that a lot of this could be confusing or seem arbitrary when solving the puzzle outside of the larger puzzlehunt context.