I've watched WanderingMind's GoE All Stages in 16:27. Really solid play and bullet dodging, congrats! I can't assess the efficiency in the later stages yet, but I've dabbled in GoE stages 1 and 2 and understand some ideas here.

In stage 2, the TAS faces the wallhugger miniboss whereas RTA faces the car miniboss. What's the reasoning behind this? Both routes have a room with many elves, but the car route must wait for a extra conga line. Are the car elves easier to kill than the TAS route's elves?

Room before stage 2 main boss: I found the same strat that gets the triple early, then moves to top edge and face straight down. The room is still scary. Ideally, you don't get cornered, but the fight takes very long and seems to rely on random powerups spawning during this fight.

Stage 2 main boss: Your strat looks both safe and fast: Piledrive turret 1, kill turret 2 on the same side of the room, then hug the wall (to dodge yellow bullets) and find reference points to shoot turrets 3 and 4 with ricocheting rainbow (the boss blocks the big green bullets from turrets 3 and 4). Nice!

My approach to the game in general was to go for the rooms that were the easiest when possible. I actually didn't watch the TAS until much later when I was good enough at the RTA. I haven't actually tried the wallhugger miniboss, but there an inconsistent quick kill that can happen with the car miniboss. It requires me to have a Power, Speed, Catellite, Hyper, or X/Y/Z pickup to possibly destroy the car as soon as it shows up. It's worth looking into though.

I like to move around in a clockwise/counter-clockwise pattern so I don't get too overwhelmed. I sometimes like to mix things up with a piledriver if I'm feeling risky, aside from the one I do to get the Triple out of the X mark on the ground. I run for health when I can because I want to have as full of a bar as possible going into the boss room.

The Stage 2 Boss took a while to get down on GoE. I run around in a circle while shooting from the right side of the room because it helps a ton with dodging the green bullets. If I have enough health after the first cycle where I can damage the boss, I will run into Turret 1 instead of piledriving it. I figure that it would give me 40 frames (1 second) to get a head start on Turrets 2, 3, and 4 that would otherwise be spent being airborne.

I tried running through the other minibosses, but I went back to fighting the car miniboss because all three miniboss rooms have long hordes of enemies to deal with before the door opens to the next room, but that miniboss ends up being the most consistent.

I'm most proud of my routing for Stage 3. I try to deal with the orbs as best as I can, the second room has me getting the Speed powerup at the end if possible going into the third room, I use rainbow bullets to deal with the robots, then equip ice going into the miniboss room. Having my ice weapon lets me deal with the long train line, then I try to piledrive the jetpack miniboss for a quick kill.

Going into the next room, I use rainbow bullets to deal with the train and the turret, then get into position to piledrive the scythe. I use a combination of ice and rainbow to deal with the sleigh and orb enemies. Now for the following room? I run into the two large robot walkers while picking up health, getting the Speed powerup along the way. I try to piledrive the large horde of elves then the horde of robots when I can. Hopefully I can get something other than Hyper for the next room.

That room gives me the most trouble in the entire stage. The walkers and the spinning enemies don't give me enough time to deal with the horde of robots that come out. The santa hat enemies though don't give me that much trouble though.

The Stage 3 boss is entirely scripted and I'm proud of how that fight turned out.