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Depends on if the version differences are enough for you to warrant buying both of them. I've personally never found the differences between each pair of games meaningful enough for me to buy both of them.
I have to ask though.....which version is "Smaragd"?
Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald have version differences. All three of them are pretty different to one another (Different evil teams in R/S, Pokemon, etc), so if you find that something that's up your ally, buy all three, but Emerald is a "director's cut" edition" so, it combines both stories. Go for that one if you don't care for the other two.
Ideally I'd also get both versions of a particular Pokemon game just because I like collecting, but that hasn't been a thing for me in the past couple of years. I'd like to get back into doing that, though.
Absolutely. If you don't have a friend who plays Pokemon you could just trade with yourself, although doing this would require that you buy a second console.
Not for me, personally - unless it's a 'third version' with enough new content to make it stand out as its own game to me. But with say Diamond and Pearl, etc., one is enough for me. I can trade for version exclusives.
Yea the former is usually me. But with the Switch, I'll have to use Pokemon Home to help out with some of it, since it's too expensive to get another Switch.