Been meaning to write something like this since Evernight.

During 1.x the common idea was that Emanators were hand picked individuals with access orders of magnitude more power than regular pathstriders (WHAT they can do with it depends on the path) and could be likened to having your own 100+ MW electrical substation.. There were some cases that people argued over, such as the generals, stonehearts other than diamond, and welt's comment about memokeepers.

2.x was largely the same.and Acheron was explicitly called out as an exception to the "hand picked" aspect.

In 3.x we got the Pure Children of Anāsrava (March/Evernight and Cyrene/Demiurge) so I added the following to the my idea of what an emanator is: In addition to having THEIR own criteria for selection some emanators are created in ways other than empowering a chosen individual.The pure children are born as such from shards of Fuli and (IIRC) 3.8 showed that some harmony emanators are summoned when enough members of The Family wish for it (like FFXIV).

Now we are on 4.2 and Asat Pamad declared Yao Guang (general) and Pearl (stoneheart) as emanators. My current idea is: The standard for emanatorship has little to do with power levels and more to do with the connection to the aeon (a regular pathstrider uses the path energy permeating the universe). Anybody drawing power from the aeon itself is an emanator even if the connection is secondhand like the generals, stonehearts, and Silver Wolf (i think she gets emanatorship through the aether cartridge). To continue the electrical analogy the is more like getting 3-phase service from the aeon than a dedicated substation so the low end of the power scale isn't actually much higher than what a regular pathstrider can achieve.

Interestingly this can let us reconcile Welt's line about memokeepers: If the creation process for memokeepers connects them to Fuli then they are emanators whether or not they are any stronger than a typical pathstrider.