After some deliberation with the moderator team, the decision has been made to retire the "Default Loadout/ Any Start" category.

While an interesting concept, there were several problems with the category, in terms of logistics.

The original idea of the category was to see which default loadout/ default start records could be beaten from a non-default start, while using default loadout still.

Originally, all default loadout/ default start records were submitted to default loadout/ any start as well for completion's sake, but this became unsustainable over the long term.

Accepting only non-default start runs into "default loadout/ any start" was considered, but this resulted in people submitting slower runs on purpose than the existing default loadout/ default start strategies.

And explaining how any of the default loadout categories to newcomers was always very cumbersome (even the name of the category is so long).

The category was also just very unpopular in general.

In the end, I don't think the category is a good fit for Speedrun.com's site layout, it is better suited as a personal challenge away from Speedrun,com. I have archived the category here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pbQCvOgzn0w4KuQ_erNunVKlQFKf4YvGHhQA5Otd_ng/edit?usp=sharing for anyone who wants to build off of the existing knowledge and keep pushing the idea further.

In other news: After internal moderator discussion, we are staying firm to keeping difficulty (Pro/Master) as only a variable for Category Extensions. We understand that some users are not pleased by this decision, but the moderator position is that merging the subcategories improves visibility and ease of use of the site overall.