No worries, I could see how one would assume that. The way I've seen it, and with the albeit limited experience I have with other PS1 emulators, there shouldn't be any reason why confirming duck settings would be an issue, especially when there are already requirements for other emulators to show various settings using various methods as seen in the emulator rules forum.

I'm not sure what you mean by settings being impossible to verify. In my time speedrunning the Twisted Metal series for example, it was fairly common for runners to simply pull up these settings' window on stream/video, and runners still do this (despite it not being required for those games anymore). Is there some other reason that these are not considered able to verify that I'm unaware of?

From my understanding, the reason Duckstation is not allowed is due to the load times not being consistent with PS1/2 console runs & load times.I feel like this thinking would make more sense if the leaderboards combined emu and console runs, however, they do not. I can definitely understand the point that the intent of the leaderboards in their current state is to provide a consistent experience in posted runs throughout. However, I'm of the thought that Emu runners (especially when put in a different categoryfrom console) would be encouraged to run the most accessible or most optimal emulator, which Duckstation certainly fits the former, while the latter is debatable. Personally, I see this as a similar debate to when PS2 runs are made using fast disc speed compared to say, an original PS1 console.

I would propose that if the Duckstation settings are the current issue, a simple gloss over of relevant settings such as Emulation Settings, Console Settings,Post Processing and Graphics settings in video runs before or after runs (likely after, due to resets potentially making this a pain to review) may be a potential solution if the moderators wish to preserve run times as being as similar to console runs as possible, or simply just want to be assured that settings like overclocking are not being used (as is the case for Bizhawk and Mednafen runs currently), with a timestamp used in the description to mark when the settings were shown.

I'm certainly interested in what the community has to say on this issue though. I don't claim to be some expert on emulators or anything like that.