I’m afraid that none of the sentences in these two sets you presented is grammatically and notionally correct:
A. Context: I’m a marriage counselor speaking before married couples.
(1) “You husbands should, from time to time, give gifts to your wives.
(2) “You husbands should, from time to time, give gifts to your wife.
B. Context: I’m the class president and am speaking before my class.
(1) “Everyone should surrender their cellphones before going inside the theater.”
(2) “Everyone should surrender their cellphone before going inside the theater.”
There’s always a strong temptation to evaluate flawed constructions like the above in terms of one-on-one correspondence between the number (whether singular or plural) of antecedent nouns and their subsequent possessives, but such evaluations are bound to fail because of certain intractable peculiarities of English with respect to the possessives and to indefinite pronouns like “everyone” and “everybody.” As we know, the pronoun “you” and the possessive “your” can be either singular or plural depending on the intended sense, and the indefinite pronouns “everyone” and “everybody” are grammatically singular but notionally plural and genderless as well. For this reason, as you yourself have found out and explained, the four sentence constructions you presented above will very often be grammatically and notionally suspect because of their inherent semantic contradictions.
When confronted with such semantic contradictions that could confuse the reader or listener, you should immediately reconstruct your sentences at the very moment of writing to make their grammar and logic unassailable. Don’t pass on the problem to your prospective readers or listeners. You shouldn’t put yourself in the situation of being criticized for shoddy, not-well-thought-out sentence constructions.
To get rid of the grammatical and semantic contradictions in the four sentences you presented, I would recommend the following reconstructions:
A. Context: I’m a marriage counselor speaking before married couples.
(3) “To each of you husbands here, here’s my advice: Give gifts to your wife from time to time.”
B. Context: I’m the class president and am speaking before my class.
(3) “Please surrender your cellphone before going inside the theater.”
or, even simpler and less intimidating:
(4) “Please leave your cellphone here before going inside the theater.”
In English as in most everything in life, avoidance of trouble at the very outset is the best policy.
Now, to your last question: When a gerund and a regular noun seem like they can both be used as an adjective to describe another noun, which one should one prefer?
My advice is to use the conventionally accepted form. In the four sets of choices you presented, the conventional usage is as follows:
“swim trunks” or “swimming trunks” – swimming trunks
“work experience” or “working experience” – “work experience”
“sleep pattern” or “sleeping pattern” – “sleeping pattern”
“dance partner” or “dancing partner” – “dancing partner"
When in doubt, follow your instinct. Hardly anybody will take issue with you on this anyway except a terribly grumpy, hidebound English grammar teacher.
