Barrier skip history

With barrier skip being the 'crown jewel' of TWW sequence breaks it's always the first thing tested after a new glitch gets found. It wasn't until 2010 when significant glitches got found where serious attempts at cracking the barrier started.
In 2010 zombie hovering was found, because this glitch lets you gain height endlessly, people immediately started testing if it was possible to hover over the barrier. It was soon realized that even if you were to mash frame perfectly, you wouldn't be able to get over it. Not to mention even if you were to get over it, the knockback region of the barrier would kick you away anyways.
At this point people realized barrier skip would have to be a 2 step process:
1.) Disable the knockback region. Which can be done by activating an event cutscene (like pulling the wind waker, talking to an NPC, etc.) on the same frame your damage invulnerability ends.
2.) Once you've disabled the knockback region, it's just the *simple* task of getting past the physical barrier, which is ridiculously tall and goes pretty far below the castle.

During this period of time there was one major theory that almost worked. We already knew you could get past the barrier from underneath by performing a wind waker dive, the only problem was that you were way too low to get back onto land. So Cheeseoman and Glitchesandstuff came up with the idea of performing a wind waker dive while dead. Then once underneath the barrier, you'd start a zombie hover to get back up. The idea was a beautiful solution towards getting past the physical barrier, but because you took damage (in order to be dead to start a zombie hover), the act of taking damage reenabled the knockback region, so you just get blown back and you die.

In 2012 storage using the wind waker was found. And just like before, people frantically raced to see if the barrier could be cracked with this new tech. Storage led to the discovery of door cancel, which let you walk through most solid objects. With this glitch the answer seemed simple; activate door cancel and simply walk past the barrier. It was immediately realized, and somewhat commedically, that there are no doors at Hyrule castle to perform the glitch (you'd think a castle would have doors??). Which created this unfortunate feeling of knowing all we need is 1 door in Hyrule to save 2 hours.

Storage did give us one final theory, easily the best of all (and really should have worked), which was theorized by Abahbob. It's pretty technical, so I'll spare you details, but the basic idea was using the death cutscene to deactivate the knockback region, then have a bomb push you off the ledge to start a zombie hover during the death cutscene, using storage to let you keep control of Link during the cutscene. However, for whatever reason, activating the death cutscene resets the knockback region, so you just get blown back like normal.

From 2012 until recently, the theories have pretty much run dry. The new tech we found just couldn't be applied to breaking the barrier. With the tech known, the only method that would work (which I proved with hacks) required you to activate an event in the middle of a zombie hover, and with current knowledge, that's impossible. So we really just had to wait until new tech got found.

In early-mid 2016 we got that new tech, which was the ability to cause entire actors to unload by fragmenting the actor memory space. Dragonbane0 proved that if you could unload ~50 unique actors, the memory space would be so filled that not even the barrier would load, so you could simply walk to Ganon's tower. Performing this glitch is still in its infancy. It's very complicated and not fully understood. At this point we have 5 or so actors we know how to unload. Dragonbane and I are in the process of finding other actors to unload to eventually make barrier skip a reality for the original version. In theory, there is no limitations to what you can unload, so we are in this awkward situation where barrier skip is definitely possible, but doing it is so complicated we don't know the steps to perform it yet.

Late July a user by the name of Girtana1 discovered the item slide glitch, exclusive to the HD version. The day it was found people spent countless hours at the barrier with the new glitch. After a week or so of solid testing by the community it was deemed that item slide was useless to skipping the barrier. However, in the rare case of brute force testing, Girtana managed to clip past the barrier using the iron boots and item slide glitch but didn't have actual proof. 2 days later it was replicated and recorded by Linkoscuro to prove it was real.
Right now it's unknown if the glitch requires iron boots. If it does, that limits the time save to around 5-10 minutes. Not needing iron boots would likely save over an hour. A lot of testing is being done to see if it's possible without them obviously. For the time being barrier skip is HD only, with the item slide glitch not being possible on the original version. However with the new actor unloading glitch (which unfortunately doesn't work on TWWHD), I can forsee the original version getting its own barrier skip in due time.