My biggest problem with Advent of Code is that the largest amount of difficulty comes from parsing their irregular inputs.
This is why most systems have regular inputs with quality parsers now. I have plenty of shit to say about JSON but it's not
467..114..
...*......
..35..633.
......#...
617*......
.....+.58.
..592.....
......755.
...$.*....
.664.598..
Like... seriously... this is the input for a problem of "collect the right numbers and add them up", which is basically what the past two days were, the increasing difficulty is the dumbness of the inputs.
@shironeko sure, the problem at hand involves parsing inputs to a data structure that allows you to evaluate adjacency.
To me, the data structure and adjacency algorithm are the more interesting parts of the problem and having to write a new parser every day for some new novel input just becomes a slog.
If they picked something standard over the series of problems, or at least just marginally changed it, so I could write a single parser that I could update and refine over the few weeks of the game, that feels like it would be better.
