Ok, wow, for someone who doesn't care about Super Metroid nor find it entertaining at all, Comicalflop sure is the most vocal person. Some more instances of such behavior and I'm going to start suspecting him of being jealous of people who actually do like the game. :D
Let me set one thing straight, the apparent "lack of interest" towards low% as a category does not stem from the category being unentertaining and unsuitable for the site. There is one huge underlying reason that covers not only this but other effects that everyone who has observed the development of TASes for the last few years can see.
Low% is and has always been one of the least popular categories for TASers to make movies on. Every experienced SM player out there would try to complete at least a draft version of an any% TAS first, the only notable exception being JXQ. Reasons for this are numerous, all of them obvious enough. Low%, while a common goal in many games, remains a niche category, so it either comes last in the priority of TAS-making, or is attempted by people who specifically want to make a low% movie.
Since the popularization of memory watch that made optimization and new trick discovery quite a bit easier, the game has enjoyed an influx of new promising players that have or have not made it to the publication in the end. In fact, there haven't been many games on the site that ever had so many experts actively working on them (counting both actual movie-making and research).
As a result, new any% movies and WIPs were produced in such ridiculous amounts (considering it's a long and complex game) they essentially made the audience jaded. Obviously, when you have a dozen of people researching the game for years, certain outlines are bound to take place and eventually solidify, making the possible improvements less and less noticeable, especially to the inexperienced eye. It's not helping that some segments, particularly the first and the last few minutes of most runs, are virtually identical. You want a proof of the audience being jaded? Easy, just look at the amount and quality of feedback the first post-Terimakasih TASes got, and the amount they've been getting in the last year or so. Not only did it drop to about 1/3 of its initial amount, most of these 1/3 are more-or-less hardcore Metroid fans (and Comicalflop, who watches every TAS to discover that he dislikes it even more — which to me is dubious behavior because I take for granted that if I dislike one TAS of a given game, I'm not going to watch another; just don't be a victim about it).
Anyway, my point is that the category is fine — and has always been. It didn't become less entertaining or technically sound. Quite the opposite. It's just that people are tired of Super Metroid. The thread is nearly dead despite quite a few surprising discoveries posted every few weeks or so. About once a year I reread Michael Flatley's 100% thread or the discussions about Saturn's RBO teasers — the document of milestone discoveries and incredible enthusiasm shared about the whole project by dozens of people, including those who have never been Metroid fans. This enthusiasm is long gone, and, oddly enough, it's the TASers themselves that made it so.
As one of the examples of the overwhelming irony that fell upon this submission's fate, Spoofer worked really hard to make this run — the low% — as close to the published any% as possible, because fastest time was his natural goal. The same thing made it less interesting to watch and less valuable as a category. This isn't going to be published, that much is already clear, so we can just drop this discussion and appreciate the run for what it is — a good job by a very talented TASer.
