[legedemon]

Nope, new sorting algorithms are still cropping up all over place. Already published sorting algorithms are still being implemented. And people are still accelerating the already existing implementations on GPU, SIMD-capable and FPGA devices.

This doesn't even cover security issues such as side-channel timing or entropy attacks (hard to believe?) or handling of denormal numbers (which will reduce your processing speed by upto 100x). Ever heard of using Fast Fourier Transform to achieve asymptotically faster sorting under certain conditions? All of the above have practical applications.

As you yourself said, there are interesting challenges in all communities. Let's not be dismissive of the algorithm design community.