For me, your new presentation worked brilliantly. The short while it took me to get what was going on, was exactly what caused me to keep reading. Granted, it is a bit of a bait and switch, but a pleasant one.
I too think the pitch is brilliant - specially when you think about the target audience - folks who get turned on by the word "Challenge", er developers, and most of them must have felt the need for something like this at some point of their life("Some day I'll have to write clean & DRY way ...").
Only thing different might be instead of giving the solution on that page itself - a hyperlink to the solution which takes you to docopt.org landing page
I agree. I thought, interesting challenge, although not interesting enough for me to actually try it. I wonder if he has any example solutions that I could look through. Huh? Ooooh.
If I had just seen it presented straight out as, "Parse arguments based on docstrings," I doubt it would have been nearly as memorable.
Great idea, great presentation!