I don't see the point in not running an active seed. If you are already seeding the map, you may as well take the side effects that come with it. Otherwise, you're better off running a map-hack in order to achieve the same outcome. Not to mention, it just makes runs smoother between resets so you don't have to restart your client multiple times between each attempt.

I think being able to manipulate items and shrines is a fun aspect for these runs and it differs them from the normal runs. In a way, with all this manipulation, they are like TAS runs that are going to push theoretical times into reality so that you can really see how fast each class can go when everything lines up.

I, for one, really enjoyed watching Ryu's stream yesterday with pushing the sorc on the Indrek Seed. Not only did it show how well Indrek did on-the-fly with the run in the first place, but it showed where optimizations can be implemented for smoother "normal" runs.