First of all, I'd like to appreciate you for your willingness to put in effort to come up with a coherent and fair meta for speedrunning this game and for verifying run requests. Nobody else was willing to, and certainly not I. This forum was dead when I first arrived, and it was dead until you and kingPomidor decided to speedrun Front Mission 3. As far as I'm concerned, the one who pays the bills gets to make the rules.

Having said that, here are my thoughts. Taking runs off the leaderboard should be the option of last resort. Every alternative possible should be explored before such a draconian measure is undertaken. And if no alternative exists, the decision should not be a unilateral one, lest it seem like a powerplay by the mod.

Secondly, I think your rule of only using Bizhawk is indeed fair. But it does increase the run time by quite a bit, as you have observed already. And as I have mentioned previously, this leaderboard is already pathetically inactive, and one of the reasons I think is the sheer time investment involved. Nobody bothered to even attempt Emma's story, even before the new rules. So I would prefer to not discourage potential runners. Furthermore, I think anybody who find some emulator configuration setup that somehow reduces the loading times etc should be demanded to share it so everyone can use it. Personally, I am willing to be lax about certain aspects because this community is so tiny, and we can afford it. Again, this is just my opinion, and I cannot justify this except for the sake of encouraging new runners.

Finally, here are my suggestions. Leave the rules as they are for now. This forum is open for discussion and negotiation about the rules, but only for those who are actually considering running this game. If/when anybody shows up, you can discuss with them. They might offer a hitherto unforeseen solution, based on their experience in other forums.

Hope this helps. I am not actively running this game, so as far as I'm concerned my opinions should be treated as no more than food for thought. I'm also only a passive mod. We had the option of restoring the runs before the website was revamped but I chose not to, because I said I would stand by your decisions.