I just ran a quick test against a recent Pd-extended nightly, I downloaded Gem 0.92.3 from gem.iem.at and put it into ~/Library/Pd and now that Gem gets loaded first before the embedded one.
The problem is that the manual and examples then don't show up in the new help browser since that stuff is now based on libdirs. So if the 'doc' folder was added to the 'Gem' folder as 'manual' and the 'examples' folder was moved to the 'Gem' folder, then the Gem standalone releases would be a pretty solid libdir.
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Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism. - retired U.S. Army general, William Odom