Satie's Trois Gymnopedies: Classic or Dud?

I should learn these though, they fit my style and don't seem very hard for the payoff

Stunt slowness can easily be overdone imo. After Sviatoslav Richter’s super slow Schubert recordings, which were sometimes profound and sometimes boring, there started this occasional tradition of ridiculously slow recordings of Schubert and Liszt by pianists of later generations which almost never work imo. The molecular cohesion of the music just gives out. That said, totally agree that ‘slow and painful’ was not meant to be a moderate walking pace. Reinbert de Leeuw can definitely pull this kind of thing off - last week I listened to his live performance of a solo piano version of Liszt’s Via Crucis on YouTube which was beyond incredible in its painful stillness (look it up!).

Have definitely loved both fast and slow gymnopedies. Gnossienes I like a little faster (walking pace).

Not "slow and painful" - think of it as "slow and sorrowfully". The preamble to my ancient copy takes pains to impress that it's dance music so it has to at least kinda lope along a bit rather than a death march.

You can play #1 pretty fast and it sounds great imo (maybe since the tune is so familiar). 2 & 3 don't work as well.

I like hearing it very slow but I’m playing it somewhere in the neighborhood of mm60 I think which is slow but not funereal. A big thing to me seems to play sempre non rubato, avoid the temptation to slow way down for the cadences.

I’m only like two years and a bit into learning piano so nailing the dynamics is a substantial physical challenge for me. I’ve heard a range of interpretation there as well. How loud do the crescendos get? Where is the forte?