Excuse me for changing the title of your essay. I should not do that.
The title was just my opinion. Some days ago, I read the excellent newsletter [1] of Filippo Valsorda about a Telegram's bug [2]. Yesterday, I googled for bugdoors and read about them and found this Apple's bug and your excellent essay (with many useful hyperlinks) about it.
1- Competitions should not reduce security for the speed.
2- We need a portfolio of winners, not one winner.
3- Put the experts onto the selection committee.
4- The world has a limited number of cryptographic experts capable of carrying out, and willing to carry out, "public" security analysis.
5- The design of DES takes 17 man-years works and 6 years R&D by IBM and NSA.
6- Narrowing the encryption problem to a single, influential algorithm might drive out competitors, and that "would reduce the field that NSA had to be concerned about".
7- NSA primary mission has always been signals intelligence.
8- What if NIST/NSA know a weakness in 1/10000000 elliptic curves?
9- F^^k publish or perish.
10- We need Boring crypto, crypto that simply works, solidly resists attacks, never needs any upgrades.
djb is top expert in high speed cryptography. He was writing a book[1] on this topic, but I can't find his book. What happened to this book?
Niels Abel: "The divergent series are the invention of the devil, and it is a shame to base on them any demonstration whatsoever. By using them, one may draw any conclusion he pleases and that is why these series have produced so many fallacies and so many paradoxes."