If they are genuinely learning the structure of reality in their studies (rather than, e.g., how to best pull off an "inside joke" among their fellow acoyltes), they ought to be capable of a lot more than just impressing classmates.

I agree with Paul Graham on this point, actually, which is that the first mover advantage is simply too strong to be overcome on any significant scale. Shakespeare is the playwright because he was massively prolific when plays were the hot new thing, and then inertia plus quality will propel him forward as the playwright until the end of humanity. There is some upper bound to the quality of plays, and Shakespeare is close enough that even though people who like plays will have contemporary favorites and those plays will be as good as or better than Shakespeare they will never significantly reduce his market share.

There's a similar experiment you can consider: start off with a bag containing one of each color of M&M. Remove one of the M&Ms chosen uniformly at random, and replace it and another M&M of the same color. What happens is that after 100 iterations, the bag will be almost all one color of M&M (this simulation is pretty easy to code; try it!). Even if you put in a new color of M&M that gets 2 new M&Ms of its color whenever it's picked, it won't dominate the old color since the old edge is too strong.