Is there a specific reason why New Game+ category is using Merc difficulty? To me that would take longer than Easy difficulty.

New Game category should have such a difficulty statement as well. Currently I am running/routing on Easy difficulty since it has dumber AI which are more predictable.

It's a combination of there being a tiny player base, and my difficulties in arranging how the leaderboards work. There's also the fact that Merc is NG+ exclusive. You'd probably have to do a mod to be able to do Merc right from the start of a fresh save. I'm not particularly against non-Merc NG+ runs. I mostly just have difficulty wrapping my head around how leaderboards get split up with the way the site is built. Main reason I put in so many subcategories for the Modifiers. I would like to figure out how to have runs sorted with something like a checkbox setup that allowed for variances, instead of having a single dropdown menu.

As for New Game, I just run it on Hard because I find it more enjoyable at that difficulty. Easy is perfectly acceptable. It would certainly make dogfights easier, and bosses safer.

Fair. My reasoning was that New Game+ would be the "any%" category, so it'd make sense for it to be on Easy. Merc would be the "skill flex" category I suppose.

Just putting my thoughts out there - depending if you want to really differentiate the leaderboard on difficulty or not you might aswell "just" do a dropdown for the difficulties and only have the normal New Game and New Game + categories. That would leave the difficulty at the runners digression. I.e. Minecraft Java Edition did a similar thing for their random seed category where the difficulty doesnt really matter for the category so its just a dropdown on the run submission.