I'm teetering on the brink of insulting a corps which I enjoy, which is the opposite of what I am trying to say. Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in a case about defining pornography (bad analogy), "perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly defining [it], but I know it when I see it". That is probably how it is with GE, that je ne sait pas quoi of drum corps, where judges are in the position of comparing apples and oranges. For me, sometimes the fairest approach is watching the reactions of die hard fans of Corps A to the show and performance of Corps B. When people spontaneously respond by screaming and jumping out of their seats, there is GE. Top GE for me is a combination of unique design, difficulty, and performance, without which the show design is meaningless.