Well I don't understand why any manual edits should be needed. Assuming the following prerequisites, I think PERFECT automatic gapless output should be do-able:

Ripper
You use a ripper which does exact rips of each track, and doesn't insert any kind of silence of its own.
Encoder
You use a LAME 3.9x with a properly working --nogap option which aligns the frame boundaries properly.
Decoder / Player
As the decoder gets to the end of the currently playing song, it should pre-load the next track, and read the first frames into the buffer, aligned exactly with the end of the first track. It should also skip over ID3 tags if possible (I don't know if some kind of offset is necessary or not... Maybe Emplode would have to store the ID3 offsets in the database or something, I dunno...

So the ripper and encoder are basically taken care of these days. The only missing link seems to be the player. I guess if the newer 2.0 alphas don't do the cache skip at the end of the tracks, that's a good improvement, maybe that puts us one step closer to gapless... But why does one have to do manual editing with your GapKiller to make an album like DSOTM sound right? If the ripper, encoder, and decoder were all doing their job, the re-constructed and decoded bits should line up the same way they do on the source, except for, of course, the differences from the MP3 loss. I don't see why the quest for gapless output has been so difficult.