they both restore the same amount of hunger and saturation. Pig our guaranteed to drop at least one piece of pork while a cow may drop none. However cows also drop leather with can be useful for armor. So it just depends whether you want more for or a little less and armor, though cows don't drop that much lower of a percentage of food than pigs it is something to take note of. Edit: As a food source though not taking into account drop rates they're 100% equal
This thread discusses the pros to 1.14.4 running of 1.15.2. The tl;dr of it is villager trading if better in 1.14.4 https://www.speedrun.com/mc/thread/pv57y
Also 1.14.4+ tnt drops 100% of the items is destroys all making Savannah village strats viable
https://www.speedrun.com/tools/timer_v1.1_i0ga3.zip this IGT will work for 1.7 and up, also found in resources
The IGTimer in resource by geosquare won't count pause time. I'm unsure if you're allowed to subtract the time if you're using RTA but if you can what I personally would do lets say is 20 seconds, subtract one or two less from the time, so 18 or 19 just to not put the verifiability into question if that makes sense.
I may be wrong but I think reloading a chunk also reloads all the entities, particles, and almost everything in that chunk so I don't think I would help you see anything in the first place.
I don't think it matters. Runs could just be timed from the video itself so as long as the timer is accurate I don't think it would affect the accountability of run. I would recommend using the in game timer though since it will give a time with loads basically.
Is the Vanilla Tweaks resource pack by xisumavoid (https://vanillatweaks.net/picker/resource-packs) allowed? I figure it should be, it just adds quality of life texture changes. Examples being a the shield taking up less of you're screen and brighter nether.