But most Project Euler problems, once you get past the trivial ones (wherein the relevance is straight-up brute forcing), have almost nothing to do with programming.
I never said they did, and I never said that Project Euler improved your programming skills (I agree with you there)
I was just commenting that IMO the reason that Project Euler comes up often in discussions amongst programmers is because many programmers tend to be the type of people that enjoy Project Euler style problems.
IMO you'd be better off doing past IOI problems.