I'm going to use your post to go on a small rant.
The only reason I stopped participating at Hwbot, is because a few elite members who control HWBot control every aspect of the "competitions". The rules are arbitrary and capricious (such as LOD/Tess manipulation) and most of the competitions are basically the same pros almost every time at the top. There are a ton of awesome members and even some great information sharing, but trends became evident the more I participated there. HwBot gives you the ability to filter results by cooling options, but still assigns points in a raw format. If the points were assigned within the hardware limitations, it would make the competitions far more 'competitive' for people without exotic cooling, and the people at the top would still be the same people at the top. Even if you didn't do it by the hardware on the submission, do it within the leagues. The extreme league members are almost always going to beat the novice league members with the same hardware, they have better cooling, per the league requirements.
Most of the competition results are unattainable for 99.99% of people who buy PC hardware. Thats not to say they arent incredible and impressive, but I felt comparing people with air cooling vs someone using LN2 on the same benchmark seems less than ideal, to me. The competitions and scoring should reflect those differences, imo. Joe Gamer who just bought a 13900KS is never going to put up the overclock that pros can put up, especially when top pros have exotic cooling and Joe Gamer has an air blower fan in a case.
This is why I really liked the one competition last year @Sugi0lover over on OC.net won, because it was current hardware, with some restrictions to keep a level playing field, and it made each person show different aspects of overclocking, RAM/CPU, etc. Its unfortunate they don't do that for all their competitions.
/rant over