I've also gone from fun-coder into researcher
And it's becoming difficult for me to devise good algorithms for bots to work with now because I want to add some real intelligence into rcbot2 and particularly good efficient means to do so, but are difficult with the capability of the hardware (and I've already wrote half of it before I went into research mode now I feell like re-writing a lot :o)
I think some one needs to create an article how to model human behaviour in a game situation with regards to sensory input like vision, hearing etc and use it to break it into pieces (like in PMBs RACC second bot again hehe) but also adding intelligent sensing and filtering the sensors of interest to manipulate bots behaviour