You're quite right that a CTF is not the same as open source projects... and I thought the point of this was exactly that. People who contribute to open source

You're quite right that a CTF is not the same as open source projects... and I thought the point of this was exactly that. People who contribute to open source projects prove they have a certain set of skills. What if you need people with a different set? What if instead of being able to learn a large codebase, it is more important that they are able to look at a problem and design an algorithm to solve it in the first place? Rarely in an open source project will you be going in and radically changing the fundamentals.