I think you are mistaken there. I checked some speedrun resources again to refresh my memory and the battle speed was only regulating the enemy's speed. The pauses you might come across during a battle is usually the enemy doing nothing during its turn.

Actually, in FF5 (GBA and earlier) it doesn't affect enemy speed at all; it only affects the length of the pause.

That is putting it mildly

e.g. "add pink carrot to chicken orange run" <--- Literally sh!t along the lines of this

also you cannot go into a shop without killing everyone apparently?!?

The Director's Cut/Remastered versions of Broken Sword 1 & 2. Both are censored to remove blood/gore and the added scenes actually detract from the pacing and atmosphere of the 1st game. Nobody should play these. Stick to the originals.

Agree. Although I did play them anyway just for completeness. I'm re-working my way through the games so I can hit the the 5th game.

Metal Gear on NES?

I could be crass and say most ports to the Mega Drive, but I'll save that.

Oh, right. This doesn't actually count, but Sonic Adventure DX had four or more years to premier on the Gamecube, and it was a butchered port.

That One Wing Angle midi is a big let down. I remember seeing my friend got so disappointed when he fought Sephiroth

The SNES/MD ports of Batman: Return of the Joker (NES originally, by Sunsoft) are fairly notorious for looking and sounding bad, and IIRC they had worse hit detection as well. Looking at some footage the Genesis one at least has more horizontal resolution which should help with some trial & error in the original, but otoh the player sprite is bigger. They were handled by US Gold I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTDK_oD44p0

Loom CD-ROM version:
The cutscenes and dialogue were shortened. There are no character closeups. It is censored. A scene which is supposed to be a reward in the Expert mode is now available in all skill levels. There is no ongoing background music. There are some questionable choices of colors in certain scenes (in one scene the anvil has bright colors vs dark colors in the FM-Towns or EGA version). The only advantage of this version is the recorded audio for the dialogues you can see in this version.

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe CD-ROM version:
It has a folder for the custom missions included in the add-ons, but they won't work there because the location for custom missions is the game root folder. The mission files have a new naming scheme. The installer asks for three DOS commands: JOIN, SUBST and APPEND. You need MS-DOS install disks here. Without them the game won't install or run. The CD-ROM version is supposed to be version 2.2 of SWOTL, but this CD-ROM version is actually a variant of version 2.1 of the game. Version 2.2 can be found in the Air Combat Classics compilation (floppy disks). This version adds a CD check as copy protection instead of the codewheel. The Air Combat Classics version has no copy protection. The CD-ROM version is the worst version of SWOTL.

Both CD-ROM versions have something in common. They were produced by The Software Toolworks/Mindscape (and not LucasArts).