Dolphin is such a well fleshed out emulation monster that I’m consistently disappointed with other emulators that don’t let me tweak things quite to the same degree. I can’t tell if it’s just the nature of Nintendo’s console architecture from that era, or if there simply isn’t the same degree of effort/priority put into exposing those kinds of features in other emulators.
Absolutely. Having such good UX is uncommon for these kinds of projects since its most contributors are going to be focused on reverse engineering tasks. It’s not to say that good UX isn’t associated with good programming, but it’s not terribly common that a project focused on reverse engineering puts effort into front-end development.