Three kinds of "gear drives".
1. Bottom-feeder junk: Pete Jackson dual-idler style, the Asian knock-offs of the dual-idler style, and the Communist Crap knockoffs and counterfeits of decent/expensive single-idler drives.
2. Expensive single-idler drives that no-one buys any more because they won't spend the money to get a quality product.
3. OEM and OEM-style no-idler gear drives which spin the cam shaft backwards compared to a chain-drive system. When converting from a timing chain, they need a special distributor gear to go along with the special camshaft. Used as original equipment on some BBC truck engines, International SV-series engines, some six-poppers, the horrible Iron Dukes, and so forth.
IF (big IF) a person is working on an engine family that has an OEM gear-drive cam, I'm good with it. If a person is racing in a class where an aftermarket gear drive makes sense, I suppose I'd be OK with it simply because that's way out of my experience and I'd have no basis for complaint.
But poking an aftermarket gear drive onto a street-driven engine that was designed to use a timing chain system, is just setting fire to money in order to annoy people within shouting distance.