Wrote a short preface and was hoping for discussion. Please leave comments on the SDA forum. Guest posting is enabled if you don't have a user.
https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/segmented_speedrunning_today.html
RTA is king. Segmented can be neat depending on the game (see Diablo) but RTA will always be more impressive IMO.
Pasting my SDA response here for visibility:
Segmented runs have definitely 'gone out of fashion' in a sense, but I definitely think there's still a place for them in speedrunning. When you look at how many people are working on "Human Theory TAS" speedruns, that's driving at the same sort of idea; a demonstration of what an ideal run would look like with all feasible human strats, just done in a single segment. The landscape has kind of changed in that sense but I still find the idea of making a really optimised segmented run very fascinating, and intend to do one myself in the future.
As for why people have moved away from it, I think it's largely due to the advent of streaming. When I say the landscape has changed, this is the biggest way in which it has; if you want to watch speedruns nowadays, you go to someone's Twitch livestream and watch them grind attempts. Very few people who are watching live speedrun attempts want to watch someone try to optimise a small segment repeatedly.
As for whether leaderboards should offer segmented categories, I guess it depends on the game and whether there's competition for it. The only game I moderate that explicitly has a category for segmented runs is Grandia, and it makes perfect sense for that game as it's a >10 hour JRPG, the type that's ripe for segmented running. Personally I don't think it does much harm to offer the option, though.
I found a lot of that post to be kind of strange. I don't think anyone really cares about the meta-narrative justification of single segment versus segmented and the entire point about streaming being a factor as not being "pure speedrunning" is a noble thought, but completely doomed to die off. It's also the sort of brazen ignoring of the modern performative era that led to SDA's fading relevance in the first place.
but really the decline in segmented is very simple, they're fiddlier to produce than single segment.
now the tech to record/stream single segment is easy to do, people do that instead. Segmented is less user-friendly to produce and isn't as interesting in a live, performative setting which is where gaming as an entire hobby, much less speedrunning has slanted to over the years.
that's it really, anything else is overcomplicating it.
Other than that one dude who does segmented runs of every Assassin's Creed game ever (there's a couple I've a passing interest in running so I've browsed the boards), I don't really know who does segmented runs these days. At least not for their own merits. I've heard of it being done to compare drastically differing routes in open-world games.