Hi!

Probably all of speedrunners (even of this game) had a run, which wasn't done at first attempt. When you'll press the + button, you'll pause the game and in the pausing menu is an option like "Start Over". Month ago I asked on the discord group, can I start like this and one of moderators answered "no". Some time ago, I did a little bit of testing and it given me that, normally hitting play is slower than hitting restart for 467ms, so please for checking and testing it, because it's a bit annoying to go to the main menu forever and trying to do a run again. I hope moderators will check and test it and will show their results or something :)

Thanks for your time Amuntendo

Since the timing varies between starting points as you're mentioning, the rules are the way they are for the sake of consistency for all runs.