Nothing wrong with hiscore support as long as people don't report spurious bugs to MAME Testers. I believe that was the main reason it was removed from core MAME to begin with...
I don't understand all the variants based on ancient versions like 0.67 and 0.84. cps[12].c and neogeo.c are probably two of the least demanding drivers in all of MAME; no one should have a PC that can't run them at full speed in modern MAME.