Well I'm not going to reply to this entire thing because a lot of it falls to a matter of opinion but I will respond to a few:
> No, you do care. You wrote several paragraphs explaining the potential motivations, reasons, and effects concerning why people do this.
I didn't mean I don't care in that regard - what I meant was I don't care if people want to play that way nor would I tell them they shouldn't, the point was from my perspective you rob yourself of the most unique playthrough by using a walkthrough the first time you play a game. I think that is objectively true - once you have played a game, there's not a whole lot it can throw at you that you don't expect in a second, third, fourth run. The first run through a game is the only time you're ever going to be able to play it blind and where the game might make you rack your brain for a while on a certain part or enemy, it is unique in that way. Resident Evil 4 regenerators - my first encounter with them was crazy, I thought they were impossible to kill because I emptied my ENTIRE supply of ammo into it and it was just growing anything I shot off back and still coming at me. My second run? Run away, get thermal scope, go back, shoot parasites. They don't intimidate me at all anymore, but I still can remember when I was totally baffled by how ridiculously powerful they seemed the first time I encountered them. A guide would have just outright told me they were coming up, what I needed to kill them, probably telling me not to waste ammo on them etc. I would never have known the "scary, immortal" version of the RE4 regenerator.
>This is a vacuous hypothetical. Figuring out S runs "on your own" is a time-consuming process that other people have put time into and decided to share so that people could do it effectively without everyone individually spending hours upon hours figuring out the most efficient routes.
It is a time-consuming process that demands extensive planning and knowledge of the game, which is why it would actually be impressive. When guides exist that literally tell you every motion to make right down to which side of the wall to hug in certain encounters and hallways, a "skilled run" becomes going through the motions.
> It still takes work and effort to do these S/S+ runs. Having S/S+ guides doesn't reduce that work...
Yes it does, you said yourself:
>Figuring out S runs "on your own" is a time-consuming process that other people have put time into and decided to share so that people could do it effectively without everyone individually spending hours upon hours figuring out the most efficient routes.
The guides / walkthroughs take the hardest part of doing a stellar run out of the equation: knowing the game extremely well and figuring out a fast route / plan based on that knowledge. You don't need any of that, all you need is the ability to read a guide saying what to do for the next minute or so, pause it, read the next minute of the guide, pause it, read the next minute of the guide, pause it, so on and so forth. The only challenge that falls on the player really is doing the large blocks of gameplay between each save (don't worry, the guide will instruct to save).
I'm not trying to shit on everything here, the guides are there to use and people will use them, I'm just saying that at the end of the day S / S+ runs aren't super impressive because the hard part of doing so has been done by someone else and painstakingly reiterated in an easily consumable instruction list.
When I do an S+ run I'm certainly going to use such a guide. I don't want to put in the work to figure all that shit out, I just want to get the weapon. I'm also not going to consider myself great / a master at the game for getting that rank, or post my results screen on here though.