Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos

If I didn't have to find all the shops I could probably cut an hour off the race time due to the inevitable backtracking necessitated by accidentally finding the next area

Oh I forgot to address this. It's probably not advisable to go into the next area without finding the shop, unless you grind more than usual. Looking for shops forces you to walk around more, so you'll be more prepared for difficulty spikes. If you do skip shops, you'll at least need to have one party stationed by a save point so you can save before you go into every new area.

I'm not totally against the idea of doing a half-speedcave race, but I do think that requiring the shops as checkpoints would help keep everyone going at relatively the same pace, which would make for a better race. If the problem is just that 4 hours is too long, maybe we should reduce the time limit to 3 hours.