In my experience the emulator development community is driven in large part by the "because I can" mentality. Developers do play games but mostly for debugging

In my experience the emulator development community is driven in large part by the "because I can" mentality. Developers do play games but mostly for debugging. Once an emulator is "done" they move on to a harder console. For example ppsspp was started by the same guy who started Dolphin. When I hung out on the ppsspp irc I found several other developers were present or former Dolphin devs. The users tend to be very game-playing focused which is part of why the user&developer relationship is so strained. Users are the pathological worst customers, the ones patio11 keeps mentioning, they are cheap and demand the sky. Meanwhile the developers are managing immense complexity and no one is getting a paycheck. It makes everything much easier to understand when you hear of developers quiting. That anyone creates anything is amazing.