Worth upgrading from Emax to Emulator II or III?

[DesolationBlvd]

I briefly had an Akai S5000 before realizing I wanted an Eighties sampler. I went from a Mirage to a Prophet 2002 to an Emax. The Emax was a labor of love, bringing it from not booting to not sampling to full SE HD spec with a SCSI2SD. It has a superior workflow and sample library, but both cruddy drop sample transposition (somewhat better than the Mirage) and limited upward transposition range (somewhat worse than the Prophet). In both cases, I'd lose the Spectrum Synth and Bird Run. (Is there a tool I can use to generate additive spectra I can feed into an old-school analog filtered sampler?)

Emulator II questions:
- Does the positional crossfade eat polyphony?
- Is the DREM as convenient as a SCSI2SD? Can it be installed in a unit that didn't have a hard drive? I'd hate to be set back to floppy loading times.

Emulator III question: Are EIIIX banks compatible?