The Final Conclusion

It is all came down to this. For at least a year and a half, there has been no answer to whether the third Rainbow Road shortcut is allowed or not. There have been non-existent investigations on whether to allow it, not many people even know of it's existence, and similar tricks have either been allowed, or banned. Well, I'm here to settle the score with anyone who wants it banned, and campaign for it to be allowed in a relatively long essay to do with the Rainbow Road third shortcut. Let the essay begin...

Firstly, there are those who say it shouldn't be allowed as a glitch, and I have to tell them to look at the shortcut everybody uses where you jump the bend in Sky Garden. This shortcut is the one where you go to the set of two ramps, and then jump across to another piece of track to cut about 1/4 of the track.

As you can see, this shortcut is clearly not intentional. In an intended cut, there is either:

A small ramp or a boost ramp allowing you to make the jump easily even with a mini-turbo.

A solid passageway like through a cave or tunnel in a castle/haunted house setting or a path that is made of clouds with small gaps you can get across by hopping. There are none of these nearby to help you make the jump, making me believe it is unintended. Other shortcuts per se would simply be cutting grass or sand, and this is much more than that.

On a different technical problem with the Sky Garden shortcut, it actually breaches the rules of the players page which has allowed it. On the FAQ, it actually says a shortcut can be 'Cutting a large portion of the course in an unintended way'. Well, according to most people's classifications, that large portion cut using this glitch is unintended cutting of a large portion of course.

But why is this shortcut so interesting to compare to the shortcut that should be allowed? Simple, the amount of course cut is exactly the same with the third Rainbow Road shortcut as with the Sky Garden shortcut, only the Rainbow Road one is actually trickier. To put this into a perspective, think of this in a checkpoint view. The Sky Garden shortcut has been found to skip a checkpoint, the one at the edge of bend. It doesn't skip two, that's why the lap counts without any further action necessary. Now, compare this to my shortcut glitch below:

Sky Garden checkpoints	Rainbow Road checkpoints
The straight on one side	The bend start
The outside edge of the bend with the bridge	The outside of the bend
The straight on the other side	The road on the other side

So on technicality, the Sky Garden and Rainbow Road shortcuts cut the same amount of the track, which suggests that if one is allowed, the other should be. People want the Sky Garden shortcut allowed, and so do most staff of the Players Page, so technically, the Rainbow Road shortcut should be allowed and practiced as well as the Sky Garden shortcut. This is also because they are just so similar. Both can be done with a mini-turbo by light karts, both can be done with a mushroom by all karts and they skip relatively similar amounts of time.

So do you know what I say? Allow both of them. Or, being more fair, here are the only two real options:

1- Allow both of them. They are both things that are natural to use when mastered so they should be allowed.

2- Ban both of them. They are both proved glitches and technically could both be banned.

For comparison reasons, here are videos of both of the shortcuts I have mentioned. I thank myself for these neat videos: