I don't know why inspection time is limited to 15 seconds. It would be interesting to allow unlimited inspection (or maybe like 30 minutes) and see how fast people could solve it then.
I remember on some mailing list we wrote program that calculated time for any algorithm using some heuristics how long would it take average speedcuber to perform specific sequences of moves. Then we would publish one scramble and everyone tried to find solution that should take shortest time. We just excluded physical aspect of speedcubing.
I also remember “3x3 fewest moves” but you can’t move the cube. We just did inspection and wrote solution on paper. In regular “fewest moves” you get scramble and can play with multiple cubes.
Given 1 hour and the scramble, work out the fewest sequence of moves to solve. Competitors are allowed to use up to 3 cubes, pen, paper, stickers etc to come up with their solution.
It's an underappreciated event in my opinion, but 1 hour is also a long amount of time, which also scales time to practice.
0: https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/regulations/#article-E-...