How do the arts of Gu Long's universe compare to Jin Yong's?

Gu Long and Jin Yong are the two premier, contemporary Wuxia novelists that everybody knows. I grew up watching mostly adaptations of Jin Yong's novels (The Condor Trilogy, The Demi Gods and Semi Devils, The Smiling Proud Wanderer, etc.) and then I finally got around to reading some of the novels.

As far as Gu Long goes, I only watched an adaptation of Xiao Li Fei Dao a LONG time ago (it must have been made in the 70's from what I remember, and I watched it as a kid in the 90's) and have very vague memories of it and the story.

To the more knowledgeable on this board, how comparable are the martial arts (and characters, for that matter) in Gu Long's novels to that of Jin Yong's? Are there any superhuman skills comparable to Xiang Long Shi Ba Zhang, Liu Mai Shen Jian and the like?

Well, pretty much all Jin Yong's heroes start out as beginners with very weak martial art and know little about Jiang Hu whereas Gu Long's heroes starts out as pretty powerful martial artists with lot of knowledges in Jiang Hu. Pretty much all Gu Long stories take place during the Ming Dynasty.

The thing about the martial arts that appear in Gu Long's stories is that the author never really explains, in a systematic way, how they work. Jin Yong often does, but Gu Long's take on martial arts is more of a metaphysical psychobabble kind of thing: "his dagger never misses because it is launched by a noble heart," rather than a full-on explanation of how chi-circulation works, etc.

That's the reason it's so hard to compare the martial arts of Gu Long's characters in the same story, let alone between characters in different Gu Long stories or (harder yet) between Gu Long's character's martial arts and Jin Yong's character's martial arts.