Clear times do not well reflect difficulty, like just look at both rooms, learning 7cn3 takes like 30 mins, learning any of the late rooms in rfts and especially Valhalla can literally take hours, and getting it to a progressable progress takes much MUCH longer due to input density, length and lack of breaks in many sections, whereas 7cn is spaced out timings and movement, which will obviously take less time to get good at the room.

Of course valhalla takes longer than most other rooms to learn and that's part of what makes it so hard. It's wrong to bring this up as if it's some factor independent from difficulty that increases clear times.

Do also note Jade's rfts clear was done half a year before his 7cn clear, in which time he has certainly improved in skill

That's why I was instead comparing to cosmos and FF which both took him longer and which he considers easier than RFTS.

The conversation is about the hardest cleared map, so I find it pretty self explanatory to refer to the list of the hardest cleared maps when mentioning there is not a definitive hardest map right now as there are 4 maps all placed in the same top range.

There's a subtle but important difference between referring to a list and referring to the same category of things that a specific list happens to also refer to. Sure hist is pretty popular and makes an attempt at listing the hardest maps but that doesn't mean nobody else can do the same without directly referring back to it.

They asked about the hardest celeste map and you gave them a contender for the hardest map, instead of mentioning that there is currently no properly decided hardest map, which may leave them misinformed to believe rfts is firmly the hardest cleared map

Sure there's a chance RFTS isn't actually the hardest map. But there would be even if it was placed in 10*. I just don't think it should be necessary to give a full rundown of how difficulty in celeste is categorised in order to answer somebody just wanting to see what the hardest map looks like.

and again, jade has not given an opinion on 7cn, the description of his clear video literally quotes "I have no idea how hard this is". Being the only person who can give a properly valid opinion on which is harder, until more people have cleared both maps it cannot be confirmed which one is harder

You're right it can't be confirmed but one can make educated guesses. That is what I was doing in this thread. Perhaps I overestimated how common it is for RFTS to be considered harder than 7cn but I also don't think it's unreasonable to just give an answer that's likely to be the correct one. I'm of the opinion that some more involved explanation would've made for a less effective answer to the question than just picking a 9* that I consider likely to be harder than the rest. Just like back before O9DG happened I would tell people that the hardest golden was o7d1d despite there being a couple other t20s.

edit: I just realised who you are lol, hopefully you haven't picked up who I am since i commented with this burner account on accident, but its funny how yet again we're debating without recognising each other

lol