I was reading around byuu’s forum (technically, preparing to make sure my question regarding the accuracy of byuu’s SMP/DSP vs. blargg’s was in the right sub-forum) when I came upon the answer to my question.

To summarize into a a perfect viral posting for social sites…

TIL: 3 Amazing Facts About SNES Audio Emulators

1. blargg’s DSP is 100% pure awesome.
2. byuu’s SMP is better than blargg’s, though.
3. byuu’s main SMP only has style points over the alt SMP core. E.g. it emulates the TEST register which nobody uses.

So was I wasting my time?

Partly. I think extracting sfc/alt/{smp,dsp} is the way to go, which makes the deep dive on the main cores mostly irrelevant, but everything I needed to know to extract them, I still need to know to extract the alt cores.