Avant is pretty right here about being more goal-focused. Since meeting either 4+ Echoes or Five Pebbles are the normal prerequisites for completing the game, it makes sense to focus those as the defining factors for their respective categories. "Skipless," on the other hand, isn't nearly as accurate or descriptive for Pebbles% since you're abusing presumed oversights to reach Five Pebbles early.

I'm in favor of this as well. The guardian skip run used to be labelled as Any% and it only makes sense to do so. Any% should be for completing the game in the fastest possible time through any in-game means necessary, without any major restrictions—which right now means skipping the guardians.

I know "No Guardian Exploit" is a bit of a mouthful, so yeah. Renaming the category in reference to the fact that you're meant to meet Pebbles/get Communication would make sense.

I'm probably going to take some more time tomorrow to do more investigating regarding the cutscene manipulation, since not knowing how it works really isn't beneficial for anyone (regardless of whether it's decided it will be allowed or not).

Right now I can confirm that off of a new file, Monk gets the short cutscene and Survivor gets the long one. Meeting 5P with one or the other previously on that save doesn't seem to be a factor. I'm not sure if the Hunter's data has any effect, but after I have him set up I'll post the save so anyone else who wants to test can quickly get started.

I'm suspecting that it may turn out to be a factor of restarting with an ascended slugcat, but we'll see.

I noticed an error in the Monk Any% rules, where the yellow slugcat is described as the Survivor rather than the monk.

The new categories look good aside, though I'm a little disappointed to see that no new runs are being accepted for v1.01 categories.

Considering everything that's been changed, it would make sense to split applicable categories into 1.1 and the update's Survivor mode once the update is officially out. After all, the speed bug's been fixed; there's some new techniques; and there's some creature spawn changes throughout, among other things. Doesn't seem clear yet whether one will tend to be faster than the other (might depend on the category), but it's clear enough that the contributing factors to the speed will be very different between the two.