I definitely believe the "Golden Cup" kids faced a production error in the Room of Harmonic Convergence. Season 1 had a handful of temple runs with dead ends, but no other run featured a two-room dead end like this run. There were runs like "Oracle Bowl" and "Joan of Arc" that featured the Troubled Bridge as a dead end, but not like the one the "Golden Cup" kids had to face. IIRC, Katherine tried every single possible combination in the room too. For some reason, you can hear a sound effect but no doors open. She's later forced to retreat all the way to the Treasure Room where she's removed from the temple. Before Katherine's removed though, she does open the Treasure Room chest AND you can hear it opening too. Similar to the tune that it makes when Mitchell opens it in "Geronimo". But when Sean enters the Treasure Room, it seems like they encountered another dead end. I'm not sure if the Treasure Room was a dead end though. Sean didn't have enough time to look, AND he never really examined the Treasure chest. Here's the two most likely routes the team was suppose to take:
1.) Complete the Room of Harmonic Convergence, and stay low for the rest of the way.
2.) Enter the top floor, and climb down through the Treasure Chest to continue on the bottom floor.
It's possible that both routes were suppose to be options, and that the team would've been forced to take the bottom floor to the artifact. It's no surprise that this temple run was riddled with production errors either. If you can recall, most of the "Golden Cup" episode was taped in S1L1 except for the temple run. Which was postponed most likely due to time constraints since this was most likely the first episode ever. The producers eventually had to shoot the temple run, so they tacked it on to S1L5. But since there were 5 other episodes that day, they probably rushed the temple run, which was probably why it was full of production errors. I definitely feel that this layout was impossible, and not even Jennifer and Damian would win in it. Too bad though. Katherine and Sean easily deserved a second chance in the temple. I would give it to them in a heartbeat!