I think that's exactly it though. When a trend develops for something, the benchmark itself becomes useless both from the social-gaming side and the corporate-trainining-aiming, just general unfairness and dishonesty all around.

and to get around that people have developed personal and private benchmark suites that reflect their own workloads, much like the proposed pie-filling-cost test.

I'd wager a guess that your grandma baked pies.