IMO scroll speed is purely preference, there's nothing wrong with the "towel trick" it's as much preference as using a "clean" skin or playing without combo bursts. might as well force everyone to use the default skin with all effects enabled. might as well ban 144hz monitors and lightboost. you can't fix it, just accept it as part of the game, tell people to not get too impressed by EZ plays if it really bugs you. perfect balance would be boring anyways.

taiko skin is debatable. for me the hardest part of taiko is executing the patterns (I'm not a pro at taiko though) so even with the mania skin (tried it today) I don't play that much better, it just saves me some grinding to get the hang of some map's patterns. I wouldn't mind if the skin trick was fixed, although I'm not 100% sure it's completely fixable. either way, I'm decent at reading mania style games (played stepmania for a couple years) and I don't see this getting me scores that I couldn't do before. and besides, with all the flaws the pp system has why worry about a minor exploit like this?

I don't think they are such critical exploits to be honest.

It's just like using gamma for high AR on std. I used it when I was just starting out with hr and ar10.3 many years ago. It seemed to slightly help at first but I could never get actually good at it and it didn't magically make me get good high ar scores. 1-2 years of grinding later, I actually learned to play ar10-10.3 properly, turned of gamma and it made literally no difference. It was all placebo.

again, even if it helped, it would be no different than using a high contrast skin or any skin optimized for high AR.