When I started using and contributing to Dolphin back in 2014, I didn't have any ideological opinions about emulators. I just started because I wanted to contribute a fix to a problem a TASer said they were having, and then I continued because it was an interesting project

Nowadays, I do have opinions about it. We should have emulators. Sure, we could ask everyone who wants to play old games to buy old hardware that might fail at any moment. But is that really realistic? It's not prohibitively expensive now, but working consoles will only get rarer as time passes. Connecting them to modern TVs will only get harder. And if you want to be able to play old games from many different consoles... well, that's a lot of consoles to fit in your living room

Yes, having a Wii is by far the most practical way to dump GameCube and Wii games, so it's hard to use Dolphin legally without having access to a Wii. But you only need to have access once. If working Wiis become rare in the future, you can at least use someone else's Wii to dump your own games, and they'll keep working forever after that

That Nintendo is doing GameCube emulation on the Switch 2 is nice in that the games selected for inclusion get a bigger audience, but they've announced... what, 10 games out of over 640? And it's not like you can migrate game discs you've bought in the past. No, you have to subscribe to a paid service. And that service will probably go poof someday, leaving us with no Nintendo-sanctioned GameCube emulation until Nintendo reinvent the emulation wheel on their next console

Also, I just think being able to play GameCube and Wii games on your PC is neat. And improving their graphics. And using whatever controllers you want in place of Wii Remote waggling. And having savestates so you can practice speedruns. And having a debugger to help with mod development. And getting to watch all those cool TASes people out there make