I think this is just too simplistic a take; Arc-AGI-1 was wide open to all models, harnesses, etc, and had quite a lot of innovative structures implemented by hobbyists. At the time, this was seen as a good thing (it was), because we don't know the best system architecture for all sorts of problems right now -> innovation is good.

The games are designed to allow assessment of a system. Knowing better systems to solve the games is a step forward. If any of the frontier labs could have one-shotted -3 in March with a custom harness, they would have done so.

Sounds like a distinction between sport and work. How useful is pure model performance if it's known that there are conditions in which even greater performance can be achieved on real tasks? How useful is it to know how fast/far a person can run if they can ride a bicycle or drive a vehicle?