I have loved this game for many years and every now and then would come back to the game to see what has been added. I want to be able to help push the time for this game down as much as I can and I was wondering what would be needed or preferred in looking for glitches via the dolphin emulator. Any advice is very appreciated!

Yeah there's a few things that you could do that would help a lot:

1. Join the discord, use the #theories and #discoveries channel to talk about or show discoveries
2. Download the JP / US savefiles and use them to make savestates all over the game to have efficient glitch hunting
3. Look into 3D clipping, thats probably the best place to start, since it's a new technique with potential for new applications that are not known yet.

I think doing a run / watching a run is a good way to understand what exactly to look for as well, so try and focus on understanding how the route works if that makes sense.

Thank you so much! I occasionally go onto the discord chat and catch up on the new discoveries. I guess I just need to find a JP version and then play and make saves states everywhere haha. Is there any settings on dolphin that might make the process quicker or improve the hunt in any way?

adding onto this, there are more resources. like alde's dolphin memory watch. these really help when finding new tricks / glitches! but yes discord is the place to be