for your first point:

all it takes to show intended difficulty is to bring up the pause menu and show the setting (right?). which is def too awkward to do in the middle of a run

but, there is an autosave the game does in the middle of the day12 introduction: when you first enter the cathedral to talk to the Inquisitor and Commander.

Would we be allowed to use that as a starting point, show difficulty, then continue on normally? (this would skip some walking in the intro which isn't timed anyway)

(edit: i suppose that in the future if the rule about timing the introduction is changed back, everyone who used this autosave start would have to redo their run. )

.

For your second point:

i did some testing, although the game does start day1 at 7:30 sharp, it takes a second or two for the autosave function to run. One time it saved at 7:33, on another run it saved at 7:31.

So i take back my idea to use this specific autosave as a starting point... unless we somehow decide to use the same save data... which sounds like too much work.

why are we playing through the intro instead of loading the auto save that happens when we first enter the town?

marble nest seems to have 4 endings according the wiki,

ending 1, accept death in the intro

ending 2, ask for another try at the end of day 10 (this restarts the demo)

ending 3, (according to the wiki) accept death at the end of day 10 is an actual ending and boots us to the menu (i think thats wrong and this might be a 100% ending actually)

ending 4, finish the heart quest line, giving you additional dialogue with the bird that triggers a "true" ending

...

ending 1 is a bit of a joke for any% but could be fun

ending 2 isnt much of an ending

endings 2-4 are dependent on the game time to progress to 21:10 (i think?)

but finding the 2 infected npc's (requires lockpicks) sets the time to 18:00 in the evening (wonder if theres others)

besides the waiting between 18 to 21:10, the rest of the run is optimizations