Ok, so its time to answer this. I was the one who came up with the Skyscrapers² idea. It was actually first meant to be a Sudoku variant in the Innovatives round of the WSC, then I believe we had the thought of moving it to some of the other rounds before I had ever written a Sudoku. Eventually this was all scrapped and we went with a puzzle at the WPC. After that, I wrote the Windows [Windows] puzzle, and it was actually these two that gave us inspiration for a full round, after which Rohan thought of Spiral Galaxy², I thought of Araf² and Deb thought of Palindrome². We had some other ideas too but they were rejected for being too complex or not fitting the theme, and eventually because the others fit so well as the concept behind the puzzle getting repeated, even the Windows variant got removed even though it was one of the first ideas, and it eventually got moved to Round 4, as WPC participants will know.

You definitely came up with the idea before I did though, by about 3 years :) I wasn't aware of it but maybe that worked out well because thinking of it as an innovative variant organically lead to an entire round. I'd like to see if there are more ideas along these lines which fit the concept.

Yes, that's great :-).