I thought IA English sounded pretty similar to the JP bank, but I will forever curse the day they made English a CeVIO bank instead of a Vocaloid one, because I feel IA English's quality would be so much better on the Vocaloid engine. (No offence to CeVIO, but until they update the engine to Pro, I'll keep on hearing muffled-ness in IA English.) IA Talk, however, sounds nothing like the original JP bank to me.
The first time I tried using the Vocaloid gender function I was so disappointed that there was no second time.
Personally, I use the GEN function like you draw other parameters (with wiggles and saw patterns) to either slightly lower or higher certain vowels if the Vocaloid sings it weirdly (ex: too high pitched and I want to lower it). I do not think drawing one straight line through the whole song works properly (unless it's a really low amount of adjustment by like 5ish). (That being said, I think there are some genderbent covers out there that sound surprisingly well tuned.)
I'm kind of the same. In my case male voices don't just appeal to me very much. I don't avoid them at all costs, but usually I'm just not interested in male vocals.
I like male voicebanks (though I've just noticed that I don't have any male voices that are part of my personal 'Love' tier, which might say something), but I think the problem is that male voices are less common for most, if not all vocal synth programs compared to female ones, so there are less really good male VBs to choose from due to less development overall. Whenever a new vocal synth is announced, the first voicebank is almost always a female. (Miku influence?)
I think companies working with Gackt are contractually obligated to make him a samurai. LOL
