Touhou 17: The survival player's stumbling block

In high level Touhou survival play, there seems to exist this vague yet (somewhat subconsciously) agreed upon idea of a "pure survival" category. There is no real definition of this category, but my interpretation is as follows:

If you can show in a single run that you can manage all patterns in the game so well that you can do them all in one go without relying on special survival- or bullet-cancelling mechanics, you have proven to have mastered the survival of that game and that you can do everything in that game survival-wise at that difficulty (usually Lunatic). In PCB, this means No Deaths/Bombs or Border Breaks, in IN this means No Deaths/Bombs and you cap/survive all last spells, and in UFO it means No Deaths/Bombs and you don't summon any UFOs (though collecting UFOs is fine as they're just items).

Currently, survival players don't really know how to translate this idea of a pure survival run into this game and its hyper system. Dodging all spirits, or even never getting a hyper, seems to be a ridiculous chore. The spirit items are huge in size and in numbers, go anywhere but the very bottom, slow down when they're near you and only leave the screen when the next stage begins. It's not feasible to request of survival players to dodge (almost) all the spirits because of this.

However, using the "real" hypers does allow for quite a bit of cheese and pattern skipping. All wolf hypers shorten boss phases drastically (and trivialise stage sections too), while eagle hypers completely trivialise stage portions. Otter hypers despawn bullets and are therefore immediately disqualified for this already.

Currently, the most promising road for the "pure survival" category seems to be:

"No Deaths, No Bombs, if you get a hyper it CAN'T have power increase/bullet cancelling properties and you can't break it"

I refer to this as LNN Neutral Hypers only, but some may call it "No Roar" or "No Hyper" or something like that. There's no commonly accepted name in the western community yet, because its a new game and semantics just kind of fall in line at some point anyways, so it's not worth arguing about much.

Honestly, I find this limitation of Neutral Hypers Only pretty frustrating. I need to spend a lot of energy towards managing my roar meter and the (RNG & big hitbox) spirit movements, while I'd much rather focus on the bullet patterns. At the same time, I can see no better way to deal with this problem.

This is quite an unique issue in the survival community. Something similar went on with UFO, however UFO tokens are much easier to dodge (as most people probably experienced by accident) and also easier to control as the "bad" color has a pentagon around it. With this game you constantly have to keep track of your meter and spend a lot of energy cleaning up these pieces whilst not accidentally using a real hyper.

This earlygame is (in my opinion) quite easy, so therefore I can still manage it mostly, though I already had some infuriating moments where I died to very simple patterns simply because the wrong spirit slowed down in front of me, or a real hyper occured whilst the s3 boss was exploding. In a full game, these oopsies will lead to extremely time-wasting and (in my opinion) tiring resets, whilst they say very little if nothing about your survival skills. It's a really annoying handicap for survival players if they end up having to do this in their runs for it to be treated as "pure survival". There's a very good chance that I'll end up only doing an LNN with hypers for the full game, even if it won't be seen as pure survival, simply because I don't want to deal with the obnoxiousness of intentionally misarranging hypers.

So that's my little essay/rant. So far I do think this game is amazing for casual/1cc play, but survival players that want to play with as little crutches as possible seem to have this one forcibly powerglued to them and they can only try ripping off some pieces of it.