I have never heard of a third-party tool contest, however that could be useful to the game. The thing is, it would limit the amount of participants to insanely skilled people like @tyrnis and not much else, and the idea of the community contest is that we can have the whole community participate if they want to.
!PIZZA
fair enough and probably more beneficial to us all, but still I cannot wait for more improvements/content/user interface :D ;)