Hi Cortex! I apologise for not fully understanding your question at first. I've written up a full, more up to date answer, because honestly just throwing an 8 year-old Reddit thread at someone doesn't feel fantastic, and didn't fully address your queries.

If we discount all of the problems that arise simply from comparing Emu to Console, there are still a myriad of issues with this whole point, to me.

For starters, it would already bring an element of unfairness as not everyone has a good enough PC/processor to run Dolphin at the same speed and power as everyone else. "Emulator = accessibility" is a bad argument when you should possess a copy of the game to rip your own ISO (although realistically, yes, people will just pirate it, that's not the point). An accessibility argument should not be founded on the implication of piracy, and more than one of us are uncomfortable with this being the case.

Another big problem is CHEATING. Even if it is an emulator focused leaderboard, you would still want it to be fair right? Now imagine how incredibly difficult it would be to moderate those runs. It would be incredibly easy to cheat in ways that would be near unidentifiable as a viewer. For example, as Sjorec mentioned in the aforementioned thread: the ability to view certain memory addresses during a run. By opening Cheat Engine during runs, a player could view normally unknown information, such as enemy positions before they appear on screen, whether you have Jump Storage or not, monitoring your stick angle for tricks like TRE... those are just a few examples, but you get the idea; it would simply be far too hard to manage the legitimacy of these runs even amongst each other without console comparison.

Secondly, leaderboards are essentially just bragging rights. Our Discord is extremely friendly and active, and welcomes & encourages new people all the time, whether they plan to run or not. You can do runs on emulator and share your time, and join in with the races held almost every week, the runners will hype you up and have fun with you regardless of if your time is legal for the boards. Nothing is also stopping you from documenting your times (whether just personally, or alongside others running on emulator), but if the argument is simply having fun with other people together, there is nothing hindering that from happening as things stand currently. Being able to have your name on a big list of other names isn't going to suddenly solve that.

Another thing to note on accessibility & the remake; you can get a Japanese copy of TTYD for around $30 USD. The remake will likely be $60 USD. It will be twice the price, then you're (probably) going to want an HD capture card which is more expensive, and then of course the console itself which is astronomically more expensive than a Wii. Technically, the original is far more accessible than the remake will be for speedruns, and yet I guarantee we won't hear the emulator argument for that game. A lot of us are going to be working on routing, glitch hunting and running the remake though, so if you're interested in that, that'd be great!

I apologise if I'm coming across as blunt, but this argument is extremely tired for us and I wanted to at least offer some perspective on this. Thank you for understanding our decision!

Please view this thread, as even though old, it covers this topic in detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/4tql3o/since_dolphin_50_now_simulates_load_times_can_emu/