why is gba emulation so hard? there are three gba emulators and none of them runs like gameyob or something (i mean that speed)
A lot of the 3DS hardware is still being discovered by homebrewers. In general, emulation is a hard thing to pull off because you need better hardware than the original console to emulate at full speed. A game running natively on the console it was design for has deeper access to hardware while a game running in an emulator doesn't. The emulator has to be running the game, so it takes more power to run the game.
mGBA is in beta, so optimization and bug fixing still needs to be done. The Old 3DS should be able to run GBA games at full speed as Nintendo has pulled this off with their Virtual Console GBA titles given to Ambassadors.