I'm mostly responding to this comment in another thread https://www.speedrun.com/posts/e679s where the response to "why no emulation" was:

There is way too much room for cheating in emulators

I get what is being said here, but what is the point of moderation if not this. If there is no advantage, then why not allow it? It could be its own category, I feel like a lot of n64 games allow emulation in this way.

I guess I'm confused with the spirit of the ruling, as it seems exclusionary for kind of no reason. Especially as time moves forward the barrier to entry gets higher and higher if you only allow for original hardware.

I don't think the original rule set is well thought out but I also don't think your solutions are necessarily good. How does dropping the taming speed to 3 help here. Like I am curious as to your reasoning for this. For example using these settings it would take between 10 min and over an hour to tame a Rex, which is super conservative and that isnt factoring into the farm time to get the feed. If youre using meat this gets much worse. Are you trying to ban taming? or just restrict taming better dinos by making it longer? Why allow taming at all then?

I think the original person who made the rules was looking for a way to accelerate the early game and thrust you immediately into the end game so you could actually just "speedrun" through the game. What it seems like youre looking for is for this to be a long version of minecraft, in which case i argue this should be a different category.

I am interested in running a 2 hour game. I am not interested in running a 7 hour game.