Okay, consistency's nice and all, but shouldn't making a coherent set of rules for the game at hand come before making it similar to other games? If said trick breaks this game but not Advance 2, then ban it here and here only. >_>
Same story with boss divisions: Unleashed has infinite rings available during bosses, whereas Sonic '06 does not. So Unleashed would get stuck with just a times chart (i.e. the boss division we use for Adventure charts), whereas Sonic '06 can have times, scores, and rings.
And thirded for rings divisions (which I'm still against, but I'm not winning this argument on an error by the other side >_>): if one small area has infinitely regenerating rings in one level, then you just ban picking up rings a second time as in Sonic 1, or subtract them from the total. It's pretty obvious when the pattern repeats itself on the conveyor belts in Eggmanland, and the goal of competition rules shouldn't be to cater to the stupid. Heck, if you get hurt during the run, you could lose half of those rings, at which point subtracting the extras you gained on the belt leaves you worse off than not collecting them at all. Obviously, this applies to scores as well via ring bonuses.
If you guys really want a failproof method to deciding who's best at all aspects of the game without any room for debate, then clearly we should just have a single time chart for Eggmanland, and a single time chart for the final boss. That includes every style of play from the entire game there. :P