After consultation with garadas21, initial decision was made to merge categories again, since previous action to seperate emu was taken without enough grounds for it.

First reason stated, that on emu is harder to recognize potential down+right left+right inputs and that keyboard gives some general advantage in movement, however this is true for many other NES games, where it isn't separated, Besides, banned inputs can be achieved on real console as well via unlicensed controllers.
It was discovered as well, that on some emulators barrel manip in level 1 ( which saves 0.3s) is 100% consistent , whereas on some consoles it's around 50-70%. Nonetheless, it doesn't make emulator runs any faster, just potentially a little less reset-heavy , when grinding for most optimized time and only in some cases (still on certain not researched consoles it can have 100% consistency).
Taking into account those two arguments, they are not sufficient to split the leaderboard. It should be conducted only, when clear advantage over console exists ( e.g. faster performance due to tricks, which can be executed only on emulators).

Before putting this change into effect, we will wait few days to get community notified and see, if there are runners against merging.