I forgot to mention an idea I had and today's post to this thread reminded me...

Everyone talks about keeping the project small. Suppose the challenge was this:
Some LAVA zealot creates a simple app that does XYZ. The challenge is simply to add a feature to the app. Any feature. This way a person can bite off as much or as little as they choose. Competition is judged on best feature added. The general framework already exists, so there's less of the "blank diagram syndrome". Maybe there's a cool bit of UI that another programmer could convert to an XControl. Maybe the program needs a faster core algorithm. The options are wider for what could be worked on and there's less of a "this is the right answer and if you haven't gotten to this point then you aren't done" which tends to make for long hours of programming to hit a specified target.

We could start with any of several items in the Code Repositiory.

This would take us away from algorithmic challenges -- which depend heavily on programming experience and moments of eureka to solve -- and moves us towards expansion of LabVIEW -- which anyone might be able to contribute to from the parts of LabVIEW that they happen to know.