1. when Xehanort gets hit by the laser is good.
2. I think having lvl1 for each difficulty is fine, with that said, as it is right now, I agree with proud lvl1 not being a good idea for a speedrun category. Hopefully this will change with later updates.
3. In my honest opinion, pre-order stuff shouldn't be part of a speedrunning, the reason being that not everyone has the opportunity to use it, This is different from other dlcs that are not related to pre-ordering, since anyone at any point can get those dlcs.
4. Well, at this point all worlds would be classified as the meme category, kinda hoping for an actual world with a later dlc for that kind of category. Also, while it is technically a world, it is not a world you can travel to like the others with the gummi ship so it's a bit weird but i digress
5. I've always thought that if the IGT is good it should always be used to avoid all kinds of weird stuff with the load times.On a personal note, this was a big issue in Nioh, where the IGT counted the loads and it didn't even count the seconds, in this game it looks good though so I would recommend using it. I haven't done a run of this game yet but I do plan on at some point.

I'll be waiting for 333% as a meme category.

I believe RTA is best. On my previous run, there was a 40 minute discrepancy between the IGT on the battle report and the actual time (no deaths mind you, just a slow external hard drive).

1. Timer starts on Brightness screen confirmation and ends on the beam after Trinity beam hitting Xehanort.

2. Add every Lvl1 category seems like the best thing to do imo.

3. I believe DLC keyblades shouldn't be allowed unless they become available for everyone. If they ever become available, I wouldn't create a different category for any% DLC, since I think they wont be released at a very high price, and I see that price as an investment to do to improve your times, similar to HDD vs SSD issue.

4. If people want to run AW then I don't see any problem with adding it to the leaderboards. Although if it's only going to be run by a few people I think the best idea is to add it as a miscellaneous category. And also to add to the categories discussion I think it'd great to add an All Battle Portals misc. category.

5. I don't know which has a bigger impact, if PS4 vs PS4 Pro or HDD vs SSD. I think the best idea would be to separate the one that has the bigger impact and add the other as a filter. Here's what I mean: if PS4 Pro HDD saves 5 min over PS4 HDD, and PS4 SSD saves 10 min over PS4 HDD, I would split HDD and SSD, and have PS4 and PS4 Pro as a filter.

And for IGT vs RTA, as long as there's no way of making IGT 100% consistent I wouldn't consider adding it as a main timing method (maybe create an option to add it for the submission but only as something secondary). If we end up with a way of removing load times that isn't manually (because that would be too hard both for who is submitting and who is verifying), then we could merge all consoles and hard drives together (something like the script Crash NST has would be amazing but I don't know if someone would be willing to put his time and effort to do it for free)

Having a run to show for the category you’re requesting is usually recommended.

And theres been talk of adding that I believe in the past, I’d assume that if there’s some interest and it gets a few runs then it could be added as a Misc category.