Quite an oversimplification, but it hit some of the high points. It’s a good little opinion piece, and worth the time, I think.

It’s absolutely a grand plan, and they’ve even written it all down. It’s called project 2025, and it’s their carefully engineered play by play for exactly this and more.

I have a X7 and a EzFlash Jr because I want my experience to be seamless and compatible with RTC games, but if you’re really after something for homebrew or don’t mind the added step for anything that supports saves, just get the cheaper one.

No

Not exactly. Some original carts with SRAM would save automatically. You could shut it off and when you turn it on again, your progress would be saved without doing anything manually(eg. Mario Six Golden Coins). In any case, even those games, you still have to do another manual operation on the cart to save the “virtual save”, so the difference is that saving requires an additional, manual step, beyond whatever the game itself requires

If you’re not playing games that save to SRAM, nothing. If you are, then saving just requires you to do it manually, rather than being able to just shut it off and be done, like the original carts would