The main reason why Dark Boshy is used is because all other any% runs also use it. The only difference between other characters is bullets: their hitbox and the position where they spawn relative to the character. Speed, jump height and everything else is the same as other characters.
For example, in a Super Metroid 100% run, you can activate ACE and use it to speed you up, but not for writing the items into your inventory without actually collecting them, and not for displaying the false item count percentage in the end.
On rewatching this: There are entertainment tradeoffs, right? It feels like there are some entertainment tradeoffs in here but I'm not familiar enough with speedrunning this to explicitly name them (though the musical stunts when invoking Bottle Ocarina is probably one of them)
Are there any videos of the old strategy for reaching Vanish Cap Under the Moat? I'd love to see how it originally looked.
Conceptually, a TAS that controls two programs simultaneously (one client, one server) is not impossible. We don't have the tools for it now, but there's no conceptual reason why we couldn't have a deterministic TCP/IP stack to go with deterministic game and deterministic server.
I'm confused. Isn't there a video on how to enter the moat door? Why not reverse-engineer how to do it from that?