Did you watch the video I linked? It talks about actual TASing environment and how it's used to make optimal movies without too much hustle. What you're describing is not workflow. What TAS tools do you use to create a TAS and how exactly do you use them?

I only use TAStudio, with markers, sometimes branches, and a lot of truncating to a start point to fix a level up and make it better.

In this instance, I kept levels 1-3

Even though as shown the current version of level 3 is slower? (This is the current userfile)

I won't always know what is best

I've been marking what's best so far so you can look at what's currently the best.

kept the old input for levels 5-8. I only did this because I figured that it was already good enough (in my own mind).

But you've grinded down level 1 and 2 twice after submission confident you've reached the limit on one of them, redone level 3 twice (to which the best version is 2 revisions ago), hit level 4 five times, improved 5-7 at least once, what I can only assume is redone Level 8 three times from scratch, level 9 four times (yes I'm including the one that stalls out before the boss) and level 10 twice after. "I don't get it" is what I'm saying if you're trying to understand what I mean. Like yes, you're 12 revisions deep into Stone Protectors this year and committed to the part, but the dedication seen in one level isn't seen in the rest with a statement like that. Also seeing the words "copied from spikes comparison video" doesn't sit well for me when it's from your own file which you can still grab from here (I'm linking to the Spiked input cause I numerically numbed them on my userfiles). And can still have that small micro improvement that you missed out on: (Focusing on starting input, not the Boss input)

om, nom, nom... om, nom, nom... nom nom