Why are people in the emudev "community" so autistic, even more autistic than speedrunners?
It's been mentioned in the thread. They are on par in my opinion. As to why, in order to make an emulator you have to do a few things. First, reverse engineer the entire (or large portion of) the console hardware. For this task you most often have the homebrew game wikis and reverse engineered code of some more common games. That is a good starting point, but almost always (especially when making an emulator for a completely new system) you have to continue that work to make sure you have every single detail. Writing a game that can run on the console means that you need to know as much as your game will use. Writing an emulator means that you aim to recreate the machine in so much detail that it can run any game ever conceived for it.
That's a task that cannot be done blindly, i.e. I would not be surprised if most emu devs had a few different revisions of the consoles they are emulating to compare the behavior. The beauty (or horror) of those times was that game developers had little resources available and resorted to all sorts of non-obvious hacks. For example some Mario games (I don't remember which ones) switch color palettes mid-frame to fit more colors on screen (they switch it to render the underwater tiles with a different color). This is not something obvious from reading the documentation, if there is any available, but rather something you learn from analysing the game's code. This shit really takes time so if you have a life outside the computer, it's going to take even longer.
Of course they are doing it all for free and with zero official documentation, on the contrary people hired by Nintendo to develop the emulators for older games likely had full access to all design documentation and maybe even contact with the original engineers.
Byuu took that idea to the extreme and decided that contemporary SNES emulators suck and he has to make one that emulates a SNES perfectly, down to some special cases of special cases of edge cases that maybe one or two obscure games ever used. Those are features that your average emulator player does not give half a shit about, they would instead prefer that their emulator had Discord integration, or ran on Android so they can play on their smart TV, or supported loading .iso files (wink wink)
I'm convinced that one of the factors that led to Byuucide was his finishing of the BSNES. This was a huge project that took an enormous amount of work and once he finished it, his life was filled with a vacuum. Such a shock could be lethal or psychosis-inducing alone. Another factor was his "social" circle where he had no real world friends and was filled with the same kind of autists, so there was nobody to slap him in the back and say "good work". There was absolutely no need for a cycle accurate SNES emulator, for the 99.9% of people it brings nothing new in terms of games. The third factor was that he was a degenerate furry gaijin in a country of traditional values. He was sticking out like a sore thumb and his negative social skills made this even worse. I'm quite sure there could be weeks where he has not talked to other people outside work. His online friends were a cult who coerced him to start taking hormones that catastrophically alter everything about your body.
He concluded he has no purpose anymore, and started a chain of bad decisions which ended around 1 pm on June 27, 2021 as he woke up for the last time and hanged himself on an extension cord. In the circumstances and mental state he was, it would be hard to not kill oneself.