opinions on the current state of pr2

[Northadox]

Am I seriously the only one who thinks that some of the additions to the game this past year have been absolutely atrocious and pointless?

Most likely. It's an eleven year old flash game on life support at the moment, with a sequel on the way. You should be grateful that the game is receiving at least a modicum of attention, even updates, no less.

There's the change to Artifacts for example; you cannot find the Artifact on an account under rank 30? What the hell is that? What kind of purpose does that serve? If you find the artifact you should be allowed to do whatever you want with the prize, and find it on whichever account you desire.

The purpose of the limitation is to prevent those who have already found their artifact on their main account to snipe the Bubble Set with a fresh alternate account that more than likely won't be touched. This is also to allow other users who may be less fortunate in their time trying to find the artifact (e.g., timezones can get in the way, lack of time to play the game, etc.), which means they may never have a shot at the Bubble Set at all. And considering that simming/macroing is a large part of why people play this game nowadays, getting to Rank 30 on a fresh account shouldn't be an issue at all.

The account deletion script is completely unnecessary as well, who thought it was a good idea to automatically delete accounts based on some requirements? It kind of sets the standards for what an account is allowed to be, according to the Staff Team, instead of allowing users to choose what they want to do with their accounts without fearing that it might get deleted, showing them that an account is basically useless unless it is above the rank of 15. There are so many Rank 0 accounts with countless amounts of good and important levels that have been deleted recently, just because of inactivity.

This is certainly arguable, I'll give you this one. However, from a developer's standpoint, it may be better to clear up database clutter and to free up usernames.

Not to mention that this script is a direct spit in the face of people like me who owned A LOT of low-Rank accounts with the Bubble Set that have been deleted from the game with no compensation at all, just because I didn't make sure to log into them because I wasn't aware of the revival of the script. 

Yeah, but...why do you need so many alternate accounts with the Bubble Set in the first place? What does this achieve, other than taking away what other users could've gotten? With the new system in place, you get a 10,000 EXP bonus when you get the artifact again after finding it for the first time, which is much more rewarding than just making a new account you will never touch because its only purpose was to find the Artifact first.

The aforementioned script has been broken for as long as I can remember until someone in the Staff Team decided that it should be fixed. These changes have made the game much less enjoyable for me, who has lost so much thanks to these decisions, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in thinking this. The current state of Platform Racing 2 is much worse now than how it was a couple of years ago, and at times I honestly wish the source code was never re-discovered, as we would have been without these outright draconian decisions today.

Considering that it was an intentional feature made by Jiggmin that was fixed, I guess the game was always supposed to be a draconian hellscape. And you also failed to mention many of the awful new game-ruining features, like a hat/part completion catalog, a new effect for the Moon Hat, and two new sets.
And it's indeed a shame that those sub-Rank 15 players' levels that haven't touched the game since 2010 have been deleted. Those 100% unique trap levels, hotels, and block spam will certainly be missed.