Glad you are having this conversation - I would like to follow developments and may have a few ideas as well. I had a conversation with a script writer about the possibility of a bot which monitors a tag eg. cyclemiles or cyclefeet - the participant would have a link to his GPX in the post, the bot downloads the gpx from RWGPS or elsewhere and extracts the releavant data.
Of course, when participants are few, there is no need for automation - but a bot could also distribute payouts, rewards and so on, not to mention draw a lot of interest on steemit. Bringing everything into the steemit platform ought to be the goal, as opposed to having data monitored on some other platform.
Yes, we are discussing that. But very few people actually download or upload gpx data. Everyone isn't a data driven cyclist. Also gpx is quantitative, we are thinking along overall lines of post quality. Not just numbers.
You can check out the Discord link and hop on board :)