Not only that but adventofcode seems to leverage purposely-obtuse input formatting as an artificial difficulty enhancement.
I stopped doing advent this year when I realized I was spending more time debugging my parsing than I was actually solving the problems. It's just not that fun for me to sometimes spend 2+ hours finding parse bugs before moving on to the actual puzzle.
The puzzles aren't fun at all. Like you said, they're basically "write a parser + complete a tedious word problem." They require substantial time investment for little creative reward, it's basically masochism.
I stopped doing advent this year when I realized I was spending more time debugging my parsing than I was actually solving the problems. It's just not that fun for me to sometimes spend 2+ hours finding parse bugs before moving on to the actual puzzle.