The time limit is only “brutally restrictive” if you assume that people spent only 9 hours the day of working on their projects. We had a week of access to the API documentation as well as access to the API developers to ask questions.

And I can't speak for anyone else who participated, but my project is going to live on and continue to improve. Maybe one day you'll even find it interesting. I suspect others who participated will do the same with theirs.