I will be doing what I call EE% or Earth Element% when my new controllers get in. The category is from the start of your file to when you grab the Earth Element. I have done it a few times.

no.

Care to explain why not instead of just saying no? It would allow people to start getting interested in the game itself without needing to learn the whole game immediately

1) A category that in its entirety is identical to a segment of another category just shouldn't exist, it should be unique with its own route, unless what you are proposing is an IL.

2) This is not the section that will get people interested in the run, its by far the most tedious and boring section that everyone wishes didn't exist. People burn out and stop learning the run by sticking in this area for too long, so its best to encourage people to move past this and learn the more fun parts of the run instead.

3) Not every idea for a category needs a leaderboard, if you find this fun and enjoyable then you do you. I personally make up loads of different "categories", route them and do runs of them for fun, but there needs to be a critical mass of people asking for a category to exist before it gets added.

4) Kind of taking aspects of (2) and (3), but I guarantee you that no current runner wants to nor would do runs of this.

5) (Personal gripe) "%" at the end of category names thats not preceded by a numeral or implied numerical value is a stupid naming convention (and yes I know we already have categories with these names but that doesn't mean they are good names )

I speak on behalf of no one but myself, but I beleive that most of the runners would agree on the points above. If you would like to discuss more about the game and talk with new people who are also learning the run then join the discord, there are a bunch of new runners who picked it up recently and have good experience with picking up the speedrun for the first time

About the 5)
Well, the % here kinda works as intended since EE is the 1st temple and thus is a certain %age of the game.

But I still agree on the category itself : it's gonna be boring. That's basically the same as reset wormholes when running Any% or Glitchless, but as a category. Please no.
And in general, just taking an already existing category, and cutting it after the 1st segment isn't a "newcomers friendly category". People don't get interested with the 1st temple in a zelda game. That's the tutorial, the thing you want to get past asap. It's not even a major turning point in the game (like Midgar Escape on FF VII).