Comment by upperhalfplane

100% agree about this too (also a professional mathematician). To mathematicians who have not been trained on such problems, these will typically look very hard, especially the more recent olympiad problems (as opposed to problems from eg 30 years ago). Basically these problems have become more about mastering a very impressive list of techniques than at the inception (and participants prepare more and more for these). On the other hand, research mathematics has become more and more technical, but the techniques are very different, so that the correlation between olympiads and research is probably smaller than it once was.