I have a slightly different suggestion for Maggie: Remove soul hearts altogether (maybe change them into flies like on Keeper or make all heart drops red hearts) and give her Eucharist as a starting item. This would make her a kind of character we don't really have: high health but relatively low damage. This would allow and often require one to play very aggressive and really use red health as a resource. Having Eucharist ensures that red health stays up but also adds more survival items that allow for even more aggressive health management.

We could also add Adrenaline on top of it, to give health management a bit of a strategic twist.

I'm fine with adding keeper. Definitely in favor of fixing the gullet. It's super-bugged with dead cat also. You die when you take the cat and also die if you drop below 25 coins (for example by taking a shop item).

For those who don't want to run Keeper, we can still have a seperate 9 chara "classic" category as some have suggested, with the 9 charas from AB.

9 seems like a really good pace, so I would stick with that.

First character I would replace is Maggy (mostly because of the longer reset times due to her low speed, in addition to her lack of original features) and rotate in Eve for her. Not sure about Keeper because I haven't tested how he works now. One big issue I had with Keeper in AB was that you had to reset for big 5, in order for him to be speedrunable and that's just tedious imo. If Keeper is buffed to the point where you can viably start most of the regular starts in a speedrun, I'm all for adding him and throwing Isaac out. If Keeper is still just resetting for big 5, only with slightly better survival rate, then I'm against it for now, and we could possibly tinker with Keeper until we've reached that goal and add him then.

I haven't followed the tourney at all so I can't comment on that but I fully agree that S&Q on Lost to prevent a death is a pretty cheap strat that takes away from the natural challenge of the character. So, I'm in favour of adjusting the rules so that this loophole is closed (be it banning S&Q on Lost in general or just in specific situations).

"shouldn't at least one and possibly multiple of the best/most involved/most respected runners be in charge of these, like in pretty much every other speedrun community on this site, too?" No, and this is why: A good mod should never let their biases affect their decision-making. With the most involved runners, their biases affect their standing in the rankings and in the community more strongly. Any decision made in a case of conflict will directly influence the way they play and the validity/standing of their past runs. In other words, they tend to have too much at stake in a critical discussion to be unbiased and objective. More often then not, they'll push for the solution that benefits them the most, especially if a lot is at stake. That makes them unsuited for being a mod. Granting them that power will often lead to abuse and, in the most extreme cases, division of the community.

Players like Hyphen and sillypears, on the other hand, are the optimal kind of mod. They are heavily involved in the community, know the game very well but they don't regularly speedrun it so they'll never have their personal standing and achievements at stake in a debate or conflict.

Should the broken remote be removed? Yes. Should cursed eye be removed? Yes. Should telepills be removed? Don't care. Should the shop pool be modified to make it better? No. (I'm not against racing on modified item pools but this should be done on a separate racing mod and not on Jud6s/InstaStart. Making such a significant change to any pool would go against what Jud6s/InstaStart is all about)

Paid as well. I hope I did everything right. Was my first time using Paypal.