thumperward, I hope this will clear a few things for you and those who wonder ... :
- Why going Zilmar speccies?
To offer a wide choice of plugins to all users.
- Why making the Xengine a plugin?
To let the users take full profit of the Xengine with another emu they like (coz it runs a game UHLE 2064 doesn't run yet or any other reason).
- Why only adding speed?
Check out our what's new list. We have added much more than speed in one release and we could add a lot more in the future.
Speed is nice to run games at full speed with higher res on slow/average machines. You got a more powerful PC? Fine. Then hopefully emu/plugins authors can express their creativity with new features without hurting the holy "FPS counter".
Also, how about porting a slow LLE emu on another platform

We're opening some new possibilities at the price of countless hours of work. Just take a second to open your eyes.
- Why not focusing on games that are barely/not playable?
That would really be "romulation", right? We're not interested in working on such a project.
- An emu that needs chuncks of hacks for each game is useless.
No. It's just got weak points, like the original UHLE. UHLE 2064 doesn't need heavy patching like UHLE 1.0 did. But that is something you can't see by yourself anyway.
- HLE is useless compared to LLE compatibility wise.
There ain't no PURE LLE N64 emulator. There ain't no pure HLE n64 emulator either. UHLE 2064 is using LLE when needed and if it doesn't doesn't hurt speed.
That's fair enough, it's understandable that "pushing the HLE approach" might mean continuing exactly as UHLE did and concentrating entirely on getting advanced games to work on low-end machines. However it seems that a lot of the work towards compatibility seems to be being done by making parts of UHLE more similar to existing 'MLE' emulators (adding zilmar specs and such).
You are entirely wrong here. Pushing it to the max would end up with perfect compat and Corn's speed.
Happy new year.