my understanding is that dolphin emulates somewhat inaccurately and is all around worse to play on. I'm pretty sure its capped at the arbitrary time to encourage new runners to run on original hardware eventually and thus everyone is on equal playing grounds. there is nothing stopping you from running on emulator past the threshold but you just cant submit.
Also you hate the idea of spending money on hardware and giving money to nintendo? you dont just get games for free, you have to buy them if you want to play on actual hardware and off an actual game disc.
we just moved the hoverless boards around yesterday, those rules were copied from any% and are going to be updated soon. as for the rest of your comments, i dont like nintendo or capitalism any more than you do, but we have to have hardware standards for top level runs of this game. dolphin is too inconsistent and varies from machine to machine. like @FireNinjaAUS said, that doesn't stop anyone from playing emulator anyway, it's just that top level runs done with these inconsistencies are not suitable for the leaderboards.
If it makes you feel any better, Nintendo stopped selling GC games and Wiis long ago, so they wouldn't get any money from you unless you choose to buy a Smash Ultimate controller from them
We ban top emu times because as 1Ups explained, emulation varies from one PC to another so emu runs can't meaningfully be compared, even with one another. For the same reason, a separate emu leaderboard wouldn't make sense either. We allow low emu times because they tend to be more spread out so the emulation differences don't matter as much, and it allows new players to start running without having to get official hardware right away. Call it half-assed if you want, but it's meant to help people in your situation.
lets be real too. if you want to become a top runner, it means you will be spending likely hundreds of hours on this game. i think forking up $100 for hours and hours of an experience is well worth it. even if you only spend 100 hours on this game (which isnt that much if you speedrun it), that comes to $1 per hour
Also just buy from a seller that allows refunds and/or is a trusted seller. If you take a few minutes to look around, you should be able to find working equipment
