As far as I know, breaking a code this hard has not been done, hence the historical part. You are right that it is not quaranteed to be newsworthy.

As a scientist (a big data crunching oriented at that), I really dont have any incentive to promote wasting computational power. My main idea here was just to show that Moo is not necessarily fully unscientific, even if the result will essentially be useless.

The main achievement of this project has probably been the advancement of distributed computing at the time when this challenge came out. I agree that it has lived out most of its usefulness, and I totally understand if/when the vote will pass to remove it from whitelist.

My main point here was just to bring out some arguments for the project and the philosphical questions this raises while also acknowledging the faults. Just trying to breed discussion, no need to be hostile about it.

I'm very interested in advancing gridcoin. The useless hashing of other cryptos is a huge waste, that could be utilized by science. Maybe some day I'll bring out a BOINC project that crunches Solar and Heliospheric data that will help to understand our solar system better.