www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5SI...

Not my discovery of course, just a little amused that it's been sitting out there for about a year and nobody looked.

The ones that I forgot about:

Ever just forget that the starters were revealed?

Things are not nearly as bad in the fanbase as they were 5 years ago, but...
The smug, back-and-forth taunting at every reveal and from people who should know better is better fitting for wiki editors in the 2000s throwing out [citation needed] and people who unironically type "*your".
Do better.

It is at most some trivia, not a design requirement set in stone.
Before the DLC Future Paradoxes were revealed, each had a different fluid color. When people were making their own designs I would bring this up to help them make it feel more authentic.
It was apparently not a big deal to them.

knowing the dub is going to force a cutesy name on me but I've had one picked out this whole time

The year is 1997. There is a level 8 Chikorita in an in-person demo that we are viewing via handcam footage.
The year is 2025. There is a level 8 Chikorita in an in-person demo that we are viewing via handcam footage.

I'm thinking if this is actually something and I'm not way off-base, you may have fought Crocomire in a different version of this room and they would have fallen down into Norfair for their eventual fight in Super. This would also explain the relative drought of bosses for this section.

In Super, you encounter Crocomire in Norfair, push them back over a ledge that crumbles, and the reward for doing this is the Grapple Beam, an item that assists you with climbing.

The one major thing you do in Crateria on the first trip is getting the Power Grip, there is no boss attached.
This room involves a large pit with a top that crumbles as you walk across it.
This room is almost directly over the elevator to Norfair.

When starting a remake you would probably apply internal IDs to the areas that existed in the original game first and then add new areas at the end of the list. So that would put Crocomire in... Crateria? Weird.
Or is it?

At first glance this appears to be progression order, which would unhelpfully place Crocomire after Mother Brain. My first thoughts were "so this is either an earlier idea for the postgame or these two were optional" but then it hit me: what if these were listed in area order?

Yeah slot 21 was Omega and its replacement was just because it was the first available to slide Mew in, Mew's inclusion was highly irregular though for a lot of reasons. These would have been normal development replacements, like the glove bug with Beedrill (or possibly Butterfree).

Lastly... when has a (used) Power Plant in this series ever had more than one main floor? It's a series standard at this point.
There's just way more evidence that those entrances were just there to clue people into getting a better view of the buildings than anything else.