I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who puts all their full runs in a spreadsheet
Can you upload a short (maybe a couple minutes) clip of you playing so we can see what the quality is like?
So old season characters become non-seasonal after the season ends, and any season specific items/abilities/etc that were not made permanent go away. This means that you can use a character once it is no longer tagged as seasonal. As long as it doesn't have that leaf tag, you're fine.
Anything ever come of this?
I think we have the right balance of categories now. Only thing I would be interested in seeing is a higher difficulty NG+ category, probably t13, but that runs into paragon and Caldesann's problems. The barrier for entry in that would just be incredibly high after a point. As for speed rifts, I think that would be similar except worse. The only good part is that they would be fast, but I don't think that's worth the trouble. If it's meta relevant, then do it for the meta. If they made an option to make a character with no shared gear/experience similar to season start, that would be a good alternative to the NG category, but until then, NG is close enough.