It might be me, but these kind of contests and our excitement about it only shows our stupidity even more. Our specialty is very fortunately not memory, it should never be. We are incredibly special creatures with much more interesting capabilities.
That a machine can outperform a human doesn't make a human doing it unimpressive. The excitement and fun of the competition remains.
A more worthwhile competition would test the participants on their reasoning / logic and turn it into an engaging game. Even gamifying brevity of language is a worthwhile pursuit since so many of todays youth speak so poorly or struggle expressing their thoughts in a coherent and curt manner.
Scrabble and Spelling Bee encourage rote learning and little beyond that. A terrible waste of potential like OP alluded to. Memorizing and parroting, needless to say, is just not a very good use of the human intellect. Its really bad form and speak to the vanity and vainness of the organizers and contestants to have these silly competitions in this day and age.
I envy Finnish kids. They've already mastered the grammar and are well on their way with the vocabulary. Spelling is barely a speed bump. English speakers have national competitions to demonstrate that they've mastered spelling.