I won't argue that the Sound Blaster and Adlib emulation is bad, it definitely is.  Gravis did a huge mistake in the marketing to say it was a good card for playing older games.  I won't apologize for that because it is a legitmate failing of the card.  That said, a lot of your points are overly harsh given that you clearly had some technical issues getting things working.  I've used it for months in a 386dx-40 and a Pentium 120, in both DOS and Windows, and never had the crashing or slow issues you experienced.  I've never heard those glitches in Duke Nukem 3D.  I *did* hear them in Terminal Velocity, but also heard them in my SB16 in the same machine, so I blame the software or system and not the GUS.

Your complaint that the audio goes down to 19 KHz when using 32 voices is a bit silly since you compared it to an 8-bit SB which maintains 22Khz -- yes, but with an SB, you're mixing 32 voices in software with a massive speed hit.  Also, this limit was rarely reached since no game used more than 8 for sound effects and 16 for GMIDI, which would produce a GF1 sample rate of 24KHz.

Your mega-em experience is *not* typical.  Not only does it work, it works well.  If you couldn't get it to run, you probably should have figured that out first before declaring it crap.  It even makes an attempt at MT-32 emulation, which is nice for older games.

The longer loading times with GUS is because the GUS is loading MIDI patches into RAM.  An additional 10-15 seconds is not that big a deal IMO.