I think Grand/Urban Challenge was the last great project and success. The openness for participation was unprecedented resulting in lot of different startups taking part (from a "serious" point of view for example that Lewandowski autonomous bike was in the GC 2004 basically an utter laughing stock of a failure unimaginable in any "serious" setting, yet it was there too, and happened to be one of the key starting points of the modern autonomous industry). I think that success kind of scared the "serious" system so that even for Urban Challenge they already had a parallel "crony" track, and seems there haven't been such an open project since then.

Wrt. original post - interesting how the catechism is different from the today's dominating approach of "we don't really know what we want, just have a very vague set of desires, lets try to achieve that small goal for that sprint which hopefully will move us in some desired direction, and we'll see after the sprint where it would lead us, and where we can make the next step from there."