Getting over it has an active modding scene. I know absolutely nothing about modding though, so I wont be of much help there.

I'll write to Oreo and see what's up. He usually doesn't take this long.

The mods have been very quick lately, Oreo is just busy at the moment. You can join the discord and post there if you feel like the verification is too slow, since he's often active there.

I have thought about having such a category multiple times. I haven't experimented with it personally, but I think it could be interesting to see how few hits it's possible to complete the game in.

The speedrun of the game doesn't focus on minimizing hits either. For a while I thought less hits would be faster, and in some places it is. But in other places the ball is hit to just make it faster.

Have you tried to see how few you can get?