does this suggest that you expect people to cobble something together without writing any new text? or, worse, go back to the old days of inserting text manually with a hex editor and compressor? because "the anti-huffman text patch" used by every modern text insertion tool seems to also fall under this category (if nothing else, it certainly belongs in the same category as essential fixes).
on a broader note, how exactly do you intend to enforce this? do you know precisely which tools apply patches before which operations? does this suggest that anyone who ever opens their ROM in FEditor is disqualified, because of its autopatches? What if they opened FEBuilder and clicked through a bunch of prompts without knowing what they meant? if this is a competition designed to attract beginners, this seems to disqualify basically everyone.