Taking out the public leaderboard makes sense imo. Even when you don't consider the LLM problem, the public Leaderboard's design was never really suited for anyone outside of the very specific short list of (US) timezones where competing for a quick solution was every feasible.
One thing I do think would be interesting is to see solution rate per hour block. It'd give an indication of how popular advent of code is across the world.
Yes: I'd argue that the timings actually work/worked better for Western Europe than the USA, I personally preferred doing the puzzle at 5am (UK) than the midnight equivalent, as I could finish before work (on a good day).
Nearly scratched a decent ranking once only, top 300 or so.
Either Russia (8am) or West Coast US (9pm) would be my preferred options.
Sadly it's 5am for me as I'm in the UK.
In 8 years I can say I've never once tried to be awake at 5am in order to do the puzzle. The one time I happened to still be awake at 5am during AoC I was quite spectacularly drunk so looking at AoC would have been utterly pointless.
Anything before 6.45am and I'm hopefully asleep. 7am isn't great as 7am-8am I'm usually trying to get my kid up, fed and out the door to go to school. Weekends are for not waking up at 7am if I don't need to.
9am or later and it messes with the working day too much.
Looking back at my submission times from 2017 onwards (I only found AoC in 2017 so did 2015/2016 retrospectively) I've only got two submissions under 02:xx:xx (e.g. 7am for me). Both were around 6.42am so I guess I was up a bit earlier that day (6.30am) and was waiting for my kid to wake up and managed to get part 1 done quickly.
My usual plan was to get my kid out of the door sometime between 7.30am and 8am and then work on AoC until I started work around 9am. If I hadn't finished it then I'd get a bit more time during my lunch hour and, if still not finished, find some time in the evening after work and family time.
Out of the 400 submissions from 2017-2024 inclusive I've only got 20 that are marked as ">24h" and many of these were days where I was out for the entire day with my wife/kid so I didn't get to even look at the problem until the next day. Only 4 of them are where I submitted part 1 within 24h but part 2 slipped beyond 24h.
Enormous understatement: I were unencumbered by wife/kids then my life would be quite a bit different.
I live in Sweden nowadays (UTC+1) and it starts at 6am so last year I woke up at 5:30, grabbed a coffee, and gave it a go.
Got nowhere near the leaderboard times so gave up after four days!