what about the festivals events? do they matter and if they matter how i remove them?

They don't

We found that there are minor things that might have an effect but ultimately since you can turn them on and off (last I checked) we decided to leave it up to the runner. If it is no longer able to be changed by an ini edit then we need to readdress it.

Dug back through the ini and seems to not be an easy change any more. So I would have to agree that, for the sake of runs being able to be done consistently regardless of the time of year, they shouldn't be allowed unless they can be enabled again regardless of the time of year without changing hardware clocks.

After doing the first run on V1.45 I can confirm the listed (Game Rule) method of turning off holiday event content doesn't seem to work anymore. Maybe change things so that you're just not allowed to use holiday content that is present, until a reasonable way to turn them off is found?

In fact, at some points they even get in the way of doing the normal run. Seems like a pretty bad idea with the current structure of the game to simply have large periods during the year when no one can even run the game. Making this change may help bring more people into the community!

Thanks for catching that. I thought I had removed that information from everywhere but had missed a spot. It has been changed.