I don't think it's silly at all. I think you have a good point about this particular contest, but there are plenty of other applications where training data is

I don't think it's silly at all. I think you have a good point about this particular contest, but there are plenty of other applications where training data is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming to collect. One way to proceed is to work on making it easier to collect and curate this data, and another is to work on algorithms that require much less data to obtain good performance.