hey

Since the restriction of not manipulating really changes the way you'd the speedrun compared to the regular manipped Any%, I personally think it's a great addition to the leaderboard (even if it might be "just" a Misc. category).

There are other games, which have a category specifically serving the purpose of not manipping major parts in the game (e.g. Golden Sun I+II, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, several Pokémon games), even if it'd be just for having a good race-category, because that's also a thing people enjoy doing.

The more arbitrary part of banning unique boss drops (Catfish Jewel in particular) is imo really important, as RealCritical said above, to prevent people from resetting over a small drop chance like 10 mins in the run, once the speedruns of the category would become more and more optimized, so that the money from these items would actually highly impact the early game route.
(To draw a comparison to a different game, in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow all enemy drops, which are not necessary to finish the game are also banned in the Manipless category)

So for our runs we were using the ruleset noted on RealCritical's website, we initially agreed on:

"- intentional RNG manipulation isn't allowed, and unintentional RNG manipulation has to be avoided where possible

- items dropped by enemies that can't be farmed indefinitely (such as most drops from bosses) can't be used in any way (meaning they can't be equipped, sold, fed), but they don't have to be dropped

-the music menu exploit is banned
"

About preventing manipulation (and this maybe needs a little re-phrasing but you should get the idea):
Based on RealCritical's work/research, the "RNG seed" is different if you create a different save, in which you did something that affected RNG, before starting a run.

So I'd suggest including the process of creating a different save game before a run into the rules somehow.

It's been a fun journey so far a being represented on the leaderboards would be great (and hopefully would make new people interested).

There is no way to skip the intro.
For the speedrun we use a prepared save file, where the intro cutscene is already over.
If you reset in the Ceres area, a save with timer 00:00 will be created automatically and if you load that, you will start right after the cutscene ended and where Samus just enters Ceres Station.
Just copy that to the other slots and use those for a new game if you don't want to watch the intro everytime.