I recently finished a catch em all playthrough of the gen 4 games without using gen 3 at all. While the run is largely the same as the current gen 4 category, removing gba insertion requires the use of safari zone objects. This makes the run last a minimum of 30 days as the wait time for safari zone objects can not be skipped by adjusting the in game time. Now while this is bad for most situations, forcing the RTA to be this long allows for single player runs to be competitive as, no matter the number of people playing the game, the RTA will be roughly the same through out. The current state of the leader board basically necessitates continuous play from a group of runners to be competitive; the gen 4 exclusive category would allow for single runners to compete as well (and move the focus to IGT rather than RTA). As for the Regis, I would propose the use of the Regigigas distribution cart, which is compatible with Diamond and Pearl. The rom for this event is freely available online and works with physical cartridges through TwilightMenu++. To prevent a player from sweeping through the game with the gifted L.100 mon, it would be limited exclusively for activating the events in platinum. I find this method to be the least intrusive (its so dumb that the regis were never more intuitively implemented.) I think this idea has potential! What are your thoughts?

So the major issue with your proposal is that you don't actually need to wait 30 days. The safari blocks can be obtained much faster by abusing the DS clock. By setting the clock 1 minute before midnight, loading the game and letting it roll over to the next day while the game is on you actually get the game to think the day has past. Repeat 30 times and you'd have all the blocks. We used this a few times in our Catch 'em All (not 30 times, but still a few, iirc we needed 8 days to pass for the mons we wanted). So yeah, the game time can actually be adjusted to obtain safari blocks much faster. The only games where you can't abuse the clock was gen 6 & 7 to my knowledge, for everything else there have been ways found.

Now to get back to your question, that would essentially mean that the only significant difference between your proposal and the existing category would be the use of homebrew software for the regi's. Personally not a fan of creating a category with just that difference for (hopefully) obvious reasons.

Oh wow! I could never get the clock method you mentioned to work! What console did you use to do it? The ability to skip that time frame does make the category incredibly obsolete. I would love to see how you did it though; that information is not well documented at all! And thank you for humoring my idea! I'm fascinated by the work you do with these games so to get a response here really made my day.

I used a regular DS for it, though to my knowledge this trick works on all DS systems (not sure about 3DS, though I'd imagine it'd work for gen 4/5). It's really easy to do as well:

1. Save the game
2. Set the in-game time to 23:59
3. Reload the game
4. Wait until 0:01 (0:00 doesnt seem to be enough for some things)
5. Repeat (if needed)

This works for everything that requires the day to pass. Swarms, safari blocks, the Curtis/Yancee trades in BW, the restaurants in DPP, you name it. The only thing I haven't managed to get to work are the massages from Daisy in HGSS, but that's mostly because the check is at 3pm rather then midnight.

I just tried it and it works like a charm! I hadn't tried waiting till 0:01 before now but its totally functional on my DSi (I just wish I would have known this before waiting a month for Solrock!) Thank you so much!

Well then, looks like via ds clock abuse and some optimization here and there through practice and proper routing, this may be something somebody actually runs. Certainly lookin forward to it :)