Or better yet, why aren't they categories / tabs? I think everyone would benefit. Runners would have more categories compete in, and viewers would have varied speedruns to watch. Or is Jigglypuff already outlawed? Because that might help variance too.

People do use the character colums for their submission. Of course there's going to be runs without video proof that never selected their character though.

You do realise how extremely overwhelming it would be to have categories for all characters on everything? Just because there's more categories wouldn't necessarily create more interest. I think this game has well enough of variety in different categories and IL's to choose from anyway. And even then the game isn't too active on the leaderboards. It's about the quality of the categories, not quantity. You're always free to use any character you want anyway.

Ah yeah that's a good point I hadn't considered, every category would be multiplied, haha.