When TASes are considered for publication, the entertainment value has great importance. If there is more than one way of doing something throughout the movie, and especially if these options are all equally fast, the most entertaining option should be chosen, or else the submission has a high probability of being rejected. Also in some cases even some things which may make the run slightly faster might still be rejected if they have an exceedingly negative impact on entertainment. This is a rather good principle in that it ensures a certain quality of entertainment, especially when from several choices the most entertaining one is required.
In the regular speedrunning community, however, it seems that they couldn't care less about entertainment. Even in situations where it doesn't really matter speedwise what you do (for example in interactive cutscenes which you can't skip), speedrunners often couldn't give a rat's ass about what is the most entertaining thing to do. They don't have to: Their run will be published anyways.
For example the HL:OF speedrun at SDA is a good example of this. In interactive cutscenes, instead of focusing into the story, following it and letting the viewer follow it too, it seems that the speedrunner made the best of his efforts to actually ruin those cutscenes and make them as unwatchable as he possibly could. He did this by, among other things, constantly (and very annoyingly) turning on and off his night vision goggles (this causes a doubly annoying effect: the screen flashes constantly, so it's almost impossible to follow what's happening in the cutscene, and turning the goggles on and off is accompanied with a noise which completely overwhelms the dialog).
A lesser example, and one which can be more argued for in terms of speedrunning, but still very annoying, is the FEAR speedrun (well, both of them, actually). The game itself is technically superb: It has superb graphics with very detailed textures, reflections, bump mapping, dynamic lighting and dynamic shadows. The game utilizes this graphics engine very well in many places, eg. by creating very cool dynamic lighting effects.
The speedruns, however, have been made with the *lowest* possible graphics settings (low-resolution textures, no bump-mapping, no dynamic shadows) and with the gamma correction turned to maximum (which effectively kills lighting almost completely, making everything look almost flat-shaded). The original game, with high quality settings, looks absolutely superb. The speedruns, with their lowest-possible quality settings and gamma correction turned to maximum, make the game look like absolute crap. Having played the game, looking at the speedruns like that is quite painful. All the marvelous graphics, lighting and shadowing completely destroyed. It almost looks like you were watching Quake2 with a monitor with a way too bright gamma correction.
I understand that from a speedrunning point of view they may want to get the highest possible framerate (to be able to react fast to everything), and by bumping gamma correction to the max they ensure that they can see everything, but from the entertainment point of view the visual quality of the video is completely destroyed and absolute crap. These runs would *never* be publishing-worthy as TASes here because of these visual quality issues.
Of course they don't care. The speedruns are published nevertheless. They don't give a rat's ass about entertainment issues.
Some speedrunners complain that TASing destroys the value of real speedrunning. Well, if they concentrated a bit more on actually making their runs *entertaining*, that would help a lot, IMO.
EDIT: PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE MAKING STUPID COMMENTS
Please don't read selectively "I hate speedruns", skipping everything else, and then make an ass of yourself by commenting on that mistaken assumption.
To make things absolutely clear: I like regular speedruns. I follow SDA and check it on a regular basis to see if new speedruns have been published for games I have played or like. Just last week I noticed a new speedrun of Driver (for the PC), which I immediately downloaded and liked. Moreover, I'm a huge fan of the QdQ speedruns and follow them even with more passion. (In fact, I even *bought* Quake (in a pack which had Quakes 1-3) partially because I wanted to see the QdQ speedruns on the actual game.)
So no, I do *not* hate speedruns in general. This is *not* an attack on speedruns or the speedrunning community.
What I do dislike is that in a few speedruns the runner seems to do his best to annoy the viewer whenever he can and doesn't seem to care at all about how entertaining the "boring" parts (eg. unskippable interactive cutscenes) of the run are. I also dislike when a runner selects the lowest possible graphical settings for the game, making it look like crap (although I understand there may be technical reasons to do that).