I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the Regex Crossword game site [0], it's shown up on HN several times [1][2] and has a fantastic user-submitted puzzle section (that includes the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle [3]) and a puzzle builder.
This is a Mystery Hunt puzzle, so solving the obvious puzzle is only the first step of solving the puzzle. You will need to do something with the puzzle solution to somehow get a word or short phrase.
I remember doing this one by hand over a decade ago. Fond memories.
I also solved it by hand many years ago but I think I never realized there was another layer to it! I was pretty proud of myself when I solved it so I’m pretty sure I kept my hand-written solution somewhere — will have to dig it up again!
I really love this kind of thing. I made one called 'redoku' a long long time ago. It generates random challenges. Try it here: https://padolsey.github.io/redoku/
What I don't like is the mystery hunt that follows. You don't know where to start, you don't know if the solution you found is correct, etc.
Even a after looking up the solution, it doesn't make me go "wow! That's brilliant". The final phrase is too short to be meaningful, it's not related to the game (at least, I can't get the connection), one of the words I didn't even know it existed in English (is it an abbreviation, perhaps? Is it American English?)...
In its original context, this puzzle was part of the 2013 Mystery Hunt which was being solved in real time during a single weekend by numerous large teams (and included about 200 different puzzles, of which this was just one). Those teams were all very familiar with the convention that every puzzle must solve to a word or phrase, and that this typically requires finding the appropriate "extraction".
Teams could "call in" their proposed answers and quickly be told whether they were correct. (At that time that was done partly over the telephone; now it's normally done automatically by a web site, with some kind of rate limiting on guesses.)
There's still a question of whether a particular extraction is good or bad, whether a particular answer is thematic, and whether the answer feels contrived. But for the originally intended audience, the extraction step was fully expected.
(I was on one of the teams that solved this in 2013, and in fact we had written the 2012 Mystery Hunt which the Manic Sages won in order to win the right to organize the 2013 event.)
Here are a few links to materials that try to explain this genre of puzzle events and some of the things that people might expect and might try:
0: https://regexcrossword.com/
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=regexcrossword.com
2: Most discussed posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674039
3: https://regexcrossword.com/playerpuzzles/8cbea27f-c4c5-4d11-...