I agree that this was very unfortunate, but let's not try to read too much into it.

From an email exchange I know that the organizers didn't know about that particular very relevant historical golf, so it certainly wasn't intentional. I'm quite sure they would not have chosen this challenge if they had known.

The link to the relevant code was in shmems post in this very thread. You being part of the perlmonks community made that information available to you too.

As the other solutions in that historical golf show, not hitting on the magic method doesn't loose a good golfer more than (order of magnitude) 5 strokes. This might indeed be enough to pass a few people on the scoreboard, but it's in fact less than the average distance between players.