Nemo wrote:If you have 2 equal players, put a game in front of them and have one person using replays and one person not, the person using replays clearly has an advantage.
No one's arguing that. What IS being argued is, under the circumstances, is it worth being concerned about? As I said earlier, people are in the tournament for different reasons.
View the tournament like a race and the highest score is the finish line.
Methinks that's something of an imperfect analogy...maybe a "race within a trip" is more accurate (it's the best I could come up with, anyhow). Playing and gradually getting better at a shmup is like a long road trip: some simply want to get the trip overwith quickly, and thus whip out the road maps and GPS system (replays, etc.), trick out their car to make it go as fast as possible, and haul butt the whole way there; the trip is thus shorter. Others, like you and me, have a general idea of where we're going, but don't mind wandering a bit, stopping to take in the scenery, making a few wrong turns, or just taking it slow. This makes the trip slower for us, but also gratifying in a different way, and more enduring.
Now say that somewhere along your leisurely trip you're invited to enter a race (the tournament), against a mix of drivers of various skill levels and such, some much more advanced than yourself: unless you trick out your car and study the race route, do you have much chance of winning? Obviously not. But think about everyone who enters a marathon footrace, as opposed to a car race: does everyone train for years hoping to win it? No, they enter the race simply because
they want to be there, they want to be part of the experience. That alone is reason enough to participate, even though you know that your techniques are no match for the others.' They're not demanding that you be able to keep up with them: is it fair of you, in turn, to ask them all to un-tweak their cars and stop looking at the maps? If "the experience" is the most important part of the deal for you, then why are you so concerned about others reaching a certain point more quickly than you in the first place?
If being a skilled shooter player is about solving the game and not just about executing, then it makes no sense to skip a critical part of the process.
It's not a matter of "shortcuts" or "cheating," it's simply taking a faster, and completely legitimate (they're still, in the end, doing everything themselves, once they're done studying) route to the same destination. What denotes a "critical part of the process" for you is simply an unnecessary side trip for others. If others prefer to make the trip quicker than you, what skin is that off your nose? You still get to take in as much of the process as you please. Once more, you can't have it both ways: you either want that high score and you want it fast, or you don't mind waiting. Neither thought process is wrong, under tournament circumstances or not, and you're simply going to have to deal with it when others choose a different route than you.
If this tournament is simply about trying to achieve the highest scores possible, then why are we wasting our time with games not a lot of people have put time into instead of games people have so we can rock out some mad scores?
Once again, I think you're taking this tournament too seriously. The prime reason it exists is so that everyone can enjoy being part of it; we've not gathered together here as a community simply for exchanging strategies and whatnot, we also want to just enjoy our shared hobby of shmupping amongst ourselves. I don't think anyone here is going for a world record, though we are all trying our best, using whatever methods we've chosen. As you say, if seeing big numbers is all we wanted, we might as well have stuck to stuff people are already good at: this fact in itself should make it clear that whatever scores are achieved are only a secondary aspect of the tournament. As such, I'll suggest once again, just enjoy playing in your own way and let others do the same.
That's my line! 
