Another thing that I think needs to be looked at is to make sure that every racer has their own "role". I think GX fell into the trap of having a "best" car (IIRC it was one you made through the customization options) so every racer has advantages and disadvantages when it comes to certain tracks.
It's certainly true that the A rated boosters and Titan G4 makes many custom machines vastly superior to most original machines and makes beating the staff ghosts muuuuch easier. The videos you unlock by beating GP mode in Master difficulty is the main way they try to make players not use custom machines, but more could have been done to make players use original machines more often. At least there are a wide variety of body parts so for most players what body and cockpit they choose comes down to personal preference.
If you look at the original machines in a vacuum there are machines for all kinds of play styles and skill levels. But snaking is way too strong on some machines and there are some machines that handle well (albeit their handling is slightly loose or awkward) and are much faster than the majority of the machines in non-snaking play (which is why I hope a re balance of the machines for F-Zero GX gets made someday by the community).
At the highest level of play there is a decent variety of machines that has WRs. Max Speed has 4 - Two of them are completely different custom machines. The other two are Fat Shark and Black Bull. For snaking it's only customs, but there are mainly 3 body parts and two cockpit parts that are used.
Finally, and although this may be a controversial opinion, I wouldn't want to see snaking make a return, or the "Fall off a corner and back on really quickly to gain loads of speed". It's a personal thing, But I find it disappointing when someone's skill at a game is based on their ability to exploit "glitches" rather than refining the actual laid-out mechanics.
I can understand why people want it, but I'm looking at it from a perspective of someone who simply doesn't have time to dedicate to learning the ins and outs of how to exploit the engine to get the most results.
I want to be able to go online, play a race with 15 other people, and then someone wins. What irritates me is if the person who won did so because they were exploiting a glitch/quirk that allowed them to go faster than was initially intended by the developers.
For example, myself an an group of others not too long ago had a big online MK8 session that was also streamed. It was great fun, except that one random Twitch viewer (Who we didn't know) joined us and proceeded to win every race because they were doing that "fire hopping" stuff. It made it not as fun for the rest of us, and eventually we just started ignoring "1st Place".
I mean, if the development team wanted to purposefully build in something like snaking then I'd be up for it, but if it's a "glitch" I don't want it to be there at all.
I've been part of the GX community since near its inception. There are certainly more than a few newer players who's rank in the time attack ladder is inflated because they use shift boosts and side attacks on courses that benefit immensely from it, but their ability to handle the machine and boost optimally is still not ideal (info on advance techs being much more available now compared to before also plays a part). If those sort of players were online, what you're saying will likely be what will happen. But at the very least they have practiced using the exploits to the point of using them safely (especially shift boosting which can be very risky). There are many courses with few or no shift boosting opportunities where the races will be evened out. In those courses players who are very good at handling and boosting will wreck the newer players who want to use the exploits.
But, like in many other games, the dedicated players who knows how to use the exploits (advanced techniques as we prefer to call them) at a high level will still be the front runners of a race even if they don't use any exploits at all because of their mastery of the game. It's like a kart race between someone who does it every now and then against a professional race car driver. If players don't have the time or don't feel like learning the tech and practice for hours, then it's only natural that they have little chance of winning a race against the top 0.05% of players who put in the time and effort in a game that's 99.99999% skill based. I know from experience that getting to the point of using the exploits well is not easy at all.
But when it comes to snaking (and space flying while we're at it) in GX, it would pose a problem if it had online play since snaking with certain machines is vastly faster, not so difficult to perform and incredibly taxing on the hands. In a perfect world there would be separate online modes but that seems very unlikely. It's something the devs will have to pay close attention to if a new F-Zero gets made and the 0%-100%Settings system remains as is.
Remove all of the exploits, and you'll get a game akin to Trackmania or any Sim racing game which seems like the type of game you would prefer. But F-Zero GX still has an active speedrunning/time attack scene because there are still noticeable improvements that can be made that are within reach but are very difficult to achieve and some recent advancements of using advanced techniques better. And I'm still playing it because there are significant improvements I can still make.
Here's how fast a player can go without any advanced techs at all (besides Momentum Throttle, which is simply letting go of A so you lose speed more slowly):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paMvKbZeNUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyId6cHPtD0
