Aren't contests normally under huge time pressure? I would think that a lot of people could solve even quite hard problems given ordinary conditions like having lots of time, colleagues, and reference materials available.
At the same time, if you've never seen a solution that uses something like DP, you're not going to see a DP problem and think "oh, I can use DP for this". Part of it is ensuring that programmers have awareness of the tools at their disposal, so they can pull them out when they're under a deadline to get something done on time that's performant
