Agreed, conventional private key cracking won't work on these high bits. Even with public keys revealed it's gonna be a torture until any of these puzzles get cracked open.
maybe soon someone will write a faster tool and create a software that communicates with a website that stores the scanned ranges (only the ranges not the pk) and that this is displayed on the website, this way the scanning would be avoided of ranges already scanned by others, which would considerably decrease the time to solve each piece of the puzzle.
obviously with the code on github for assembly and transparency.
If we construct the pool, this will be done. I've seen it in older pools.