Pmprog suggested holding a ladder or tournament way back in 2012. This is an interesting idea. The problem would be having rules that manage all the variability in starting conditions, not just difficulty but all the mods that are available. I'd like to participate in something that compared our progress game-month to game-month.
Anyway if anybody has ideas about how this might be organized, please post.
Eventually I suppose there could be in-game support, uploading scores or something to a friendly site such as the mod site.