Sometimes competing in a competition can provide the impetus to actually start something and more importantly, complete it. They aren't for everyone, but certainly based on the success of events such as Ludum Dare, and even some of our competitions, they are very popular. Plus, they can serve as a proving ground for game ideas and concepts.

As for the engine...

1/ You are right, there are engines out there, but they are normally one persons solo project. This means they are normally not as well documented as they could be, have a fit for a particular purpose, and people generally seem very reluctant to (a) let go of it and let other people in or (b) offer to help out because normally when people get to hear about it they are well under development. The idea (and this is based on comments and chats with various members here) is to start from the bottom, with many people involved. That way everyone can learn something (this is a key reason to do it) and the pressure isn't on one person to do everything (this can be a big factor and has probably resulted in a number of promising projects ending prematurely). And the proving it can be done comments... well, I'm just passionate about this place. I want to try and demonstrate to the nay sayers that Pascal is a viable choice for developing games and hopefully grow the community. The popularity of Pascal is an issue granted, but I've encountered people who have been ever so surprised when I told them I developed games in Pascal 'Oh, you can do that can you I would have thought you'd use C++ or something like that'. If new developers are coming through and they get hit with that kind of attitude, they may never give Pascal a try out.

2/ There were fewer developers using Pascal. Activity in the job market and on Delphi related sites (Stack Overflows Delphi section for example) suggest that actually the number of people using it is increasing again. With the advent of the cross platform capabilities in XE2, the language is becoming a far more viable choice again. Development as we know it is not going to stop anytime soon, people aren't going to stop using PCs anytime soon and programming skills will always be needed (someone has to write the stuff that allows non-programmers to make things). The most likely scenario you've highlighted is that the popularity of Windows will decline... I hate to say it, but whilst consumers need machines to do things like surf, watch movies, read their email, play games... there are only two real alternatives at the moment... Windows and Mac OSX. Linux, despite massive progress towards being more usable (IMHO at least) still cannot compete with the big two in terms of ease of use.

3/ The author was me and I completely stand by what I've said for the reasons I've highlighted above. Starting one as a community is a great chance for everyone who has ever wanted to do it, or has done it previously but has stopped because of the pressures of being a solo dev on the project etc., to actually do it and say 'I did that', 'I made this game with the engine I helped build'. I don't know about you, but I like that idea... I like it alot and so do alot of other people. They want to do it to be part of a bigger project (one that they probably couldn't fully complete on their own), to have the satisfaction of doing something, and because they'll hopefully get the chance to learn some stuff along the way.

Who's going to develop it? We are. Who's going to test it? Us and anyone who's using it. Who's going to use it? Us and anyone who wants to.