Ahh, ok, I read through the thread again, and I can really see the difference between the two methods, the Gerstner waves do look a lot more like real waves, so that makes sense. And I’m sure the weather is a big, especially if you are planning to drive the waves (partially) by the wind speed. Are you planning to go that route? or is it too big of a performance hit to calculate all that as well? It would be a nice , but I think for mine I will stick to waves that “appear” to be driven by the wind and fake it a bit, I don’t need quite that level of realism for my project. How you have yours set up currently looks really good, are you just driving it from a blueprint?
I just started working on Gerstner waves myself (got the actual function working, now implementing it in a material), I decided to give it a try after reading through the GPU Gems article. I was considering using the Beaufort method at first, but after reading up some more on the (like Handkor’s tutorial for example) I decided to go with Gerstner. No real reason why, but I’m glad I did! I just noticed you mentioned using the Tessendorf paper, and it sounds like it was a simpler way of going about , so I think I have some more reading to do weekend! 
Implementing has been pretty complex, I started out the same way with basically a more advanced version of standard ocean material (with panning height & normals). That obviously didn’t work for realistic water, so I decided to try the hard way. So far I’m glad I decided to go for it, I have learned a lot about materials (and rendering in general) in the process. I really appreciate all of the info you have in thread, so thank you! 