First of all, I got pissed because you decided your vote before you got an explanation. You assumed it was badly planned, which it wasn't. But I got better things to worry about at the moment.
Now for the explanations:
Very obviously the path sticks out to me, why did you go from Pumpkin Zone to Turtle Zone back to Pumpkin Zone and to Mario Zone? You did the pipe glitch in Mario Zone, why not just use pumpkin pipe glitch in Mario zone to mario zone pipe glitch until you are done with Mario zone, then go to Turtle Zone using mario zone pipe glitch one time...after that I can understand going all the way back to Pumpkin zone.
Because the pipe glitch level in pumpkin zone is the first one.
The pipe glitch level in mario zone is the second one. That means doing pumpkin zone first = play an entire level once. Playing mario zone first = playing an entire level twice. Levels are long, and it's faster to play a full level only once and go back to pumpkin zone a little (notice that the path to pumpkin zone is NOT that much longer than mario zone) is faster than playing two ENTIRE levels before being able to use the pipe glitch, and then having to walk back a little for mario zone. This wasn't just guessed, it was tested and calculated.
edit: I may have misunderstanded your question. Do you want to know why didn't we use the mario zone pipe glitch to beat turtle zone?
Because, believe it or not, it's faster from this point to go to pumpkin zone's first level (which has a pipe very early on it), than going to mario zone's second level (which has a pipe in the middle of the level).
The fact that the map route looks wild, but is the fastest only shows we knew exactly what we were doing. If it was an obvious route nobody would complain and you'd be happy with a slower movie.
next is getting the last two coins. do you HAVE to fight both of those bosses for their coins? Now it seems like Space zone must be done normally, so why not have that one be the one you play normally to get the Wario castle entry animation..which seems from this run has to happen for the game to keep going..
I don't really understand the question. Yes you need all 6 coins. Then Wario's castle is accessible.
You do understand that the pipe glitch doesn't work on all levels? We used it on every level that it works. When it doesn't work you die by falling through the bottom of the screen. The screen doesn't even scroll down to follow you.
This then brings me to enemy gathering. Does it really take long to defeat those balls in wario castle without the super star? I mean you killed that first one really fast to get the super star, and it looks like you went pretty out of your way to defeat those enemies to get the superstar, and then on top of that going a little slower might manipulate the wario battle better?
Did we really get out of our way to kill the enemies? aside from a little lag it has caused (few frames), we didn't. If it is faster to not worry about the starman, it will be by a mere couple of frames.
I didn't see you guys using that "jump and get pushed forward an extra pixil" a lot..granted through the entire game seems like would save maybe a few frames...and also granted that I may not have seen it being done even though it actually was.
It only works on blocks. Mario needs to barely hit his head on the block after passing under it. Name a single place where we forgot to do that please (frame number).
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By the way, that reminds me what was the deal with the door opening animation (which lasts about 10 seconds): there's a possibility (I don't remember if it was tested, but I don't think it was), that if you take the last coin by beating a boss level through a glitch instead of normally (like we did for the first 4), the door animation may be skipped. If that's true, we would have to use a completely different map route (SLOWER, and I mean a lot slower), to accomplish that. I'm not in the position right now to say that it would be faster, and my guess is it wouldn't, but it certainly is something to be tested if someone would think about improving this. Remember, that new route would have to not be 10 seconds slower than the route in this movie.