There's been a few done, but the general consensus is that glitchless is a bad run for this game

First you'd have to define glitchless, which would be kind of weird. Questions such as which patch? Are out of bounds allowed, since they're technically not glitches (you don't have to save+quit to get back in bounds)? Are dialogue skips allowed? Glitchless is definitely a thing you can do, but the vast majority of runners of this game have basically no interest in it since it's incredibly slow.

Oh - I wasn't arguing that savequitting was a glitch, just that you never have to savequit to get back in bounds unlike in some other games.

The patch would matter, though, as far as differing damages - amp damage in 1.1 activates on every bullet instead of being spread out, Cloud Kill on Maya in current patch is wildly overpowered, etc. I'm sure there are others but that's just the main two I know of.

The length would bother me, specifically because you'd have to do a lot more farming, because you'd still want to be underleveled, but you still need to be able to kill things and not die. In double runs and all quests runs, you only have to farm Boom Bewm/Bad Maw a couple of times and that's all the farming needed (I think, I don't run either category). It's also not necessarily that the run would be much slower in length, just that it would feel MUCH slower, since you can't do glitches to speed things up.

I agree that glitchless takes a different kind of skill, it's just not a skill that any of us are super interested in perfecting. But if you're on console, I think you should absolutely lead the way if you want to in glitchless - make it interesting to us! Do some cool routing! You can always retime your run to remove loads and be competitive, so console doesn't really even lose anything.