My main use case for AoC is practice with new languages. So I tend to prefer to do the same one from several years ago over and over, because then I can focus on grokking the language and not the problem, and I can compare my solutions across languages to get a better feel for how they affect how I solve problems.

The leaderboard is occasionally interesting to me for the first week of December, but, realistically, I can't see getting invested in it without also moving far, far to the west of where I live now.

Don’t you risk solving the problem in suboptimal or just “wrong” ways for the language you’re trying?

I don’t know about others but I‘be found AoC is quite good for naturally discovering how you’ve solved a problem “wrong” or sub-optimally when you get to Part 2.

I also check out how other people did it on GitHub. But only after I've taken a crack at it myself first.

Thought about that last year. You wouldn't have your solutions public but any chance?