pashuteh – I don’t know if anybody on this thread is still interested, but I just heard your vort last night, and it was presented as the gematria vort that you parenthetically mentioned. That said, I don’t believe it’s true until someone counts them out for me. Frankly, I think gematrias are generally extremely flimsy; they are often wrong, even by more than the “off-by-one” rule (which in and of itself drastically reduces the impressiveness of gematria in general).
I don’t see any reason to claim the gemara is not superfluous, or even that it has no mistakes. I think it has extreme value and teaches us a many important lessons, but I personally believe that labeling something as ‘infallible’ when there is no reason to do so just causes problems that otherwise would not have existed.