Want to watch them being superoptimized. The Any% inevitably focuses on overall improvement.

Would play a few, but an hour and a half of speedrun is too hardcore for me.

Well I worked on it during my grinding, there are 3 different categories to be considered for ILs:

1. Any% : when the level is played for the first time in a new game, as fast as possible without skipping it.

2. New Game+ : when the level is replayed after having saved all the mandatory animals on your way during a previous run. This category doesn't apply to Scrat and Boss levels.

3. 100% : when the level is played for the first time with the condition of getting the star in normal levels and Boss levels, and picking the golden acorn in Scrat levels.

I specify "played for the first time" because some animals are mandatorily on your way and have to be saved during the first play. Those animals are gone afterwards, so It has to be considered for Any%.

Then we have to decide how to time the ILs. The simplest way to go is to consider only the IGT displayed at the and of Scrat levels and after clearing each normal levels. But there is no IGT for Boss levels. If we consider RTA, then it is more complicated to decide when to start and when to stop the timer.

About the optimization, only the Scrat levels or somewhat interesting because there is no cycles or RNG involved. For most normal levels, you pretty much rely on the earliest geyser cycles, some of which are related to the best possible Crash&Eddie RNG. And for Boss levels, resetting until you get slightly better RNG than the previous record isn't much appealing to me.

Lastly, if you play on emulator and use a savestate right before entering a level, resetting at the savestate make you get the same geyser cycles and the same Crash&Eddie behavior consistently. This means that you can easily setup the savestates in order to get the ideal cycles and RNG, then reset over and over while keeping those cycles and RNG. That is not interesting ILs to me, it is the method I used to optimize my gold splits.

I'll let other mods give their opinion on this analysis before adding anything.

Good point about the savestates. I wish mods from other communities I enjoy would have considered that. It led to trouble later on. I 100% understand.

NinjaCock I used to mod a community with a simmilar issue with the svaestates.

One of the solutions we considered was forcing all runners to record or stream their session of attempts when they used emulator. You can add &t=70 at the end of a youtube link to jump to 70 seconds into the video.

The community disliked the idea because there already existed players who were already used to not streaming or recording long sessions. But here the comm is still small, all runners could agree to build the ILs with this rule active from the very beggining. Solving the problem

Hope it helps <3