For what it's worth, I am also in favor of timing these by adding up the in-game timers. This gets rid not only of the loading screens, but also of the leaderboard screens. As it is now, you could theoretically get a better time simply by getting a worst run to make sure you don't move up in the leaderboards and skip that screen.

Then again, that might be considered a speed strat in itself, and removing it would make running this game simpler. The debate, I guess, is do we want this speedrun of a shoddily-made minigame to be simple or tech-heavy?