New Platinum Any% Route

Q: How did the new route come to be?
A: minnow had the idea of skipping all optional trainers in Platinum with Chimchar, and beating Roark with battle manip. As it turns out, this works well in general, but it's especially beneficial for Platinum Any%. This is because you already teach Rock Smash to Chimchar in this category, so there's no opportunity cost of Rock Smash taking up a move slot.

Q: How many trainers do you skip?
A: The old route fought the Shinx trainer, Lass with 4 pokes, Machop worker as well as both Gym trainers. Skipping 5 optionals in total, this leaves us at lv10 for Roark.

Q: What other differences are there between the old and new route?

A: The new route requires a +Speed nature on Chimchar, and for this we need to find new seeds. This process requires careful deliberation, but there was only one Chimchar seed that came out on top. This Chimchar has these IVs:
30 HP, 31 ATK, 26 DEF, 28 SPA, 20 SPD and 30 SPE with a Naive nature.
This is a little bit different from the old route which had:
26 HP, 31 ATK, 21 DEF, 29 SPA, 24 SPD, and 30 SPE with a Naughty nature.
The chosen Chimchar is still not perfect, 31 SPA would have guaranteed Ember* on the 2nd Zubat in Floaroma. With 28 SPA, this is a 14/16 range. Pretty good all things considered. 

Q: What about the Golduck seed?
A: Finding Golduck seeds was a much more difficult process, as you need to manipulate a seed with a good enough Golduck at a reasonable distance from Roark, and also find battle manips that line up without losing time. Our initial target was to have two consecutive seeds that both have Golducks, so that we could hit two seeds instead of one. However, this did not work out. It turns out that getting through Oreburgh Gate without getting encounters was a major issue. When you save, reset and change time to do a manip, it activates the DS clock penalty in Gen 4 games. This, unbeknownst to us, also nullifies the reduced encounter rate of the date we use for the run, 9/23. We only discovered this after successfully completing two manips all the way to Golduck, which was IRL timeloss.

Because money is much tighter due to not fighting 5 extra trainers, we also had to skip as many repels as possible to save money for Super Potions and Net Balls. We aimed to skip both the Eterna Forest repel (the old route repels there) and the Mt. Coronet repel. The second one turned out to not be possible to skip due to the RNG advancing more than expected after the Golduck catch. We can still just barely make this seed work though, we have enough money for 3 Net Balls and 3 Super Potions. This means we have to reset around half of our runs to Golduck, as we need at least 1 Net Ball for Tentacruel.

Q: How good is the Golduck?
A: The requirements for Golduck are not that tight, the most important thing is to get a Lv40. This Golduck has 28 HP, 18 ATK, 15 DEF, 15 SPA, 5 SPD and 29 SPE with a Rash nature and Damp ability. 15 SPA is all you need to get a 255/256 range on Mismagius, which is the benchmark we aim for. Lower defense is actually good, Maylene now does more damage to us. We want Golduck to die in a double battle later on, so that Tentacruel gets all the EXP.

Q: How much time does this route save?
A: Short answer, around 80 seconds. Skipping the optionals saves around 4.5 minutes, but we lose more time due to the S+Q and other fights being worse, notable timelosses being the Galactic Double and Gardenia. The Pachirisu double is also scarier than before. The full estimate can be found here: https://pastebin.com/tKrkth9f

Q: I want more info.
A: Much of werster's FAQ is still relevant. Read here: https://pastebin.com/Ly73w2RQ