Turbo

There's been quite a lot of talk about the use of Turbo in speedruns recently, specifically about leaning more towards allowing it.

There's obviously points on both sides, and both are totally valid. The tl;dr of my viewpoint is that -
1) It's still, as always, up to each individual speedrun community what rules should be in place regarding this, or any issue.
2) It's my view that it's generally for the best to create a space where people can use Turbo in runs freely - but that it should be a separate place to runs that do not.

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'For' Turbo:

Speedrunners do very often face hand/wrist pain from long periods of pressing the same button over and over. Having turbo being allowed would prevent a decent size of this, to allow people who face this pain to go through mashing segments of games without mindlessly smashing the buttons and causing themselves further damage.

Taking care of our bodies is generally more important than inducing long term hand/wrist pain just to get 1 second lower on a video game. And having more people being able to interact with speedrunning to the highest capacity they can without causing harm to/injuring themselves is a good thing for everyone.

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'Against' Turbo:

I think to start it's important to note that Turbo isn't something that can only be used "for mashing", which I sense a lot of people think it is. For example - I could name quite a few games where using Turbo would allow for much easier RNG Manipulation setups that a human would not be able to consistently perform, by going through sections at reliable speeds (essentially unlimited consistent inputs, even if not optimal, is insanely beneficial.) So it would actually end up changing the very way the game is played - what is and isn't possible, the route, etc. And that's a pretty massive deal.

Also, as someone who is quite competitive and has been quite outspoken in the past on computers assisting in speedruns, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that I would not be pleased to be competing with others who are having an automated sequence press the buttons for them. If we're allowing computers to hold the information for us, make all the decisions for us, *and* press buttons for us too, it becomes near on impossible for me to personally say it's a speedrun performed by a human. That isn't to say it isn't valid or worth doing - but that it's something *else*, just like a segmented run is something else to a single segment run, or a TAS is different to an RTA run.

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Misc:

I've seen some people say things like mashing isn't really a skill. This is ridiculous, if some people can do it better than others, it absolutely is a skill. And even more so when you combine it with other inputs (mashing fast + movement, for example)

Turbo would introduce a few things for leaderboard scrutiny that I've seen people bring up (e.g. what frequency of Turbo would be allowed, how can you detect this, different controllers having different options, having to buy ($$) specific controllers), etc. While I think most arguments that rely on "oh no how would moderators be able to tell if they are cheating?" are ridiculous given that exists for so many things already, making specific decisions on frequencies and what have you would again have to come down to individual communities, because different games, platforms, controllers, emulators, etc would all have different problems and therefore different solutions.

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Anecdotal:

Having speedrun for a long time, I have come across wrist pain more than a couple times. More so in the past than I do now, because I manage myself a lot better than I did as a teenager. That being said, most if not all of that comes from running games like 2D Sonics (Air Dashing in Sonic Advance is the worst for this particular issue that I've come across), which is not something that Turbo would really circumvent at all.