I understand your point of views OP, it does and does not make sense and let me explain why I think so:

It makes sense because you want to have even competition which could lead to better times, but the main question falls down on to: are you willing to pour every waking second into running this game? Because if the answer is no, you already lost, because top notch runners like Ela or Distortion already do and they outclass and outgun me every step i.e.

And here's why it does not make any sense: speedrunning is essentially a racing, and you want to go as fast as possible, so to have the best time in the world you need to have the best possible gear you can get. Some runners get Japanese version of the games because it's faster, some runners build up high end PC's because it's faster, some runners buy better controllers because they have more buttons to map to and it's easier to handle, so why would runners want to willingly go slower than they can? And as in every racing, let it be WRC, F1 or flying races, no one has exactly the same setup either, because some people have simply more resources to spend than the others, but you don't see them giving up on racing. Sure there are categories for the performance itself, but even a single category has ranging performance, i.e. no car has exactly the same HP or weight either.

As for people having stuff paid for by viewers, sure, but keep in mind they built up the audience from nothing and who are we to say they are not allowed to reap the fruits of their hard labor? Who knows, maybe in 2 years you will be in that position too.

As for myself, I have PS4 Pro I got with my own money as I am simple gamer with 0 viewers, but when there's a will, there's a way or something like that. Don't give up because you have weaker gear than the others, you might realize you have more skill and beat them on times anyway.

Separating player base between PS4 and PS4Pro modded or unmodded would pretty much kill the game in my opinion because you would have a player base separated even more and you don't really want to separate runners as you want them to compete against each other as much as possible.

I hope all this makes at least a bit of sense and I wish you all good luck have remember, it's mostly just about having fun ^^

Even if you would impose max level cap rule, you wouldn't be able to limit level of guardians or the title ranks, since you can't de-level those. But yeah, Twilight category is missing as well as Way of the Strong category would be nice.

fortunately you can de-level pretty easily by using the book to reset stats and skill points so it would be viable to have more categories like that I guess, I mean, with regards to what I wrote earlier by no means I want to restrict others fun, but I think plenty of people will feel like you do so I guess there's no harm into adding categories with limiters.

By the way I am currently making comparison video for speed and ki usage depending on armor usage, I would appreciate your feedback on it once I upload it if possible

I am interested in running this game as my first, so I apologize if what I am going to write is not going to make any sense as I have no experience with speedrunning except following couple runners.

I don't think having too many categories like 'max level xx' would be good because it would separate the community and I believe it is better to have higher number of runners in between small number of categories rather than having many categories with few runners in each, if that makes any sense, more people in one category means more competitive community.

Anyone who wants to run this game will play this game casually first and end up on level 100+ and probably start off there, once you finish the game levels will scale up to 190 so why not make a category capped somewhere around that level? Destroying the early levels would mean being able to train the game faster and hence again, more competitive because resetting after a fail wouldn't cost you that much time and you would be right back in the action.

And then no gear bare hand runs of course ^^

edit: you can switch between 'way of the strong' levels and default version after you complete the game, mark of the strong is a scaled up sort of a NG+ mode, mission levels are scaled up between 160-190.