It's the same as the door on the plane on stage 11. Too close/scroll too fast and it won't register as having gone past the load next screen trigger point.
Seen/heard it mentioned a gazillion times on Twitch streams since launch week. :D
I wouldn't make assumptions about whether people will do anything with their lives or not based on videogames discussions.
None of my runs are in empty categories so I'm not sure which point it is you're trying to make that is relevant to the topic of: 'are there too many categories?'
"Only" 35 seconds behind WR in a game that takes just 7 minutes to complete is like being several minutes behind a 45 minute SoR4 arcade run tho ;D
If your desire is that more people speedrun the game then you're still left with having to do the work of trying to get more people interested in SoR4 speedruns in the first place. And in an organic manner, not an artificial one.
Promote speedrun streamers; get friends interested; get other communities interested; contact Summoning Salt and whomever else and ask them to make videos about the SoR4 speedrunning community; make videos yourself and get the word out; petition Jordi to add time attack to the game, etc.
'That's why Im thinking if reducing the number of categories will bring more competition and then an overall better quality of runs'
The only reason I've done a run on Cherry Easy/Hard difficulty this patch is because the streamers who run the character haven't bothered yet.
I'd expect to see less competition, not more, if you removed categories, and all that people had to run were against the top tier streamers runs who have invested thousands of hours into the game. I'm not going to bother trying to compete against streamers because the time commitment makes zero sense for me as a non-streamer. The time investment would be detrimental to my own career/desire to play more than just a single game.
What you would really need to advocate for is Jordi (the developers) to include time attack mode/leaderboards and a time attack timer on screen, officially in game like they do with score. The mentality of most players is to go for score because that's what is hyped in-game through the leaderboards (non-PC) and the in-game combo counter and those juicy rank S giving you that sweet dopamine hit seeing the big numbers. At least this makes sense to me why there are far more score runners/interest in score, as dull as it is, than speedruns.
I'd wager it never occurred to many people to speedrun this game because the combo counter/end of stage rank number/leaderboards/presentation are all about score.