This is arguably
worse than the current convention, because of the fundamental closeness between kilo- and kibi-. It scales up well, though.
In general, calling these puzzles NxN dodecahedra is probably the simplest change, with Megaminx being the official name of the 3x3 dodecahadron (unless circumstances require us to change it to "3x3 Dodecahedron"). This follows the current "NxNxN Cube" naming scheme that the WCA has adopted.
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Quoting both of these for relevance:
For me it's a combination of two factors. (I don't attend comps very often so whether an event is official or not is almost irrelevant. Kilominx is in the forum weekly comps, so that's "official" enough for me.)
(i) The hardware sucks, big time. There's no reason that a kilominx can't have the 36-degree corner cutting high-end megaminxes (Galaxy, etc.) have, but the Shengshou one simply doesn't. Given that the CubeStyle one looks like it has a very similar mechanism, I doubt it's any better. (Reverse corner cutting is absolute garbage but then to be fair, reverse cutting on megaminxes also sucked before the Galaxy v2.)
(ii) There's basically zero active method development. I could try stuff like generating CLL and "EG" algs, but those are pretty large alg sets (unlike 222; CLL has around 200 cases), there's no easy way of recognising the cases, and why would I put in the effort if nobody else is going to make use of it?
(iii) Not exactly a reason and actually this is 100% my fault: the random-state scramble generator is horrendously slow. (One minute to initialise, lol?? And some people are inexplicably still using the Python version, which is even slower.) It's also not integrated into any timer, so you have to go through an awkward copy-and-paste procedure to get the scrambles into, say, csTimer.
A quick point-by-point comparison to Skewb:
(i) The LanLan Skewb was the only decent Skewb for the first 6+ months after Skewb became an event (and for a long time beforehand). Speed-Skewbs were quickly developed to meet the demand. The truth is that there's not enough demand for good hardware until there are official benefits for getting good at an event.
(ii) Skewb has been a sledgefest for years with very few methods coming close to Sarah's methods. I suppose you could say that Sarah's advanced method existed before Skewb was an event whereas CLL is not yet particularly popular, but again the incentive would definitely be there if it became an event.
(iii) This one, I can't really argue with. Skewb scrambles did exist in CSTimer pre-eventhood. I don't believe they were random-state yet, but
some quick research shows that there was a random-state Skewb scrambler around 2012.
The way I see it, just about any
reasonable event that gets added would become popular and have a decently large following just because it's official. I think the main concern the WCA has is that it's not necessary to expand the event list when there are other automatically-expanding areas to deal with (namely competitor limits of big competitions).
(I don't necessarily agree with that mindset, but it is definitely a legitimate concern.)
(i) I totally agree that more/better hardware should exist. Kilominx is, for all intents and purposes, very brand-exclusive. With skewb, the brand possibilities were Meffert's, QJ, and LanLan (the preferred option by most sub-10 skewbers in 2013).
This said, I agree with DG and can almost guarantee that hardware advancements for non-WCA puzzles will come only after made official (and thus exponentially more popular), and will only increase the popularity of these events. This occurred with Square-1 with the QiYi, with 6x6x6 and 7x7x7 (when made official, the only brand was V-Cube), most notably the ShengShou skewb and later the Wingy, the X-Man Megaminx/Pyraminx... As an aside, I'm definitely of the opinion that the lack of a good Clock and the logistical infeasibility at competitions work against its popularity big-time.
The only other way out is for puzzle designers to design better mechanisms for currently mass-produced puzzles for the sake of hardware improvement. (Hi Ben
)
(ii) When skewb was added, there were four viable methods: Sarah's (which took over due to sledge/hedge finger tricks and clear progression), Kirjava/Meep, Rubikskewb, and RSM. For kilominx, there is no active method development because there doesn't really need to be. Skewb was conceptually new, so a rich variety of approaches was not surprising. Kilominx is just a megaminx, but smaller... so the approaches were largely set in stone. The only developments have been 2x2x2 Cube-style sets. Nothing really 'new' conceptually, and with a much tougher barrier to entry.
(iii) No random-state scramblers were in qqTimer or CSTimer until after skewb was official. There were random-state solvers for skewb for a long time, but they were all horrendously slow. Perhaps the best one was Meep's MATLAB solver prior to the existence of ksolve+, but thanks to some very technically advanced folks, skewb scrambles are fast. I'm thinking that if 4x4x4 Cube random-state scrambling can be reasonably fast, then so can kilominx.
