It happens all the time. People nag the devs and they get annoyed & stop working on the game. Then they might get interested enough later to work on it again. Perfect example of this was when the devs worked on the CPS3 games. They were constantly being nagged & getting emails where people were harassing them to get it working perfectly so they could set up the games in there game cabinets. The devs finally got so sick of how rude and pushy people had gotten, that they stopped any further work on it. Luckily they have very minor bugs now. The best way to get a game working in MAME is to let the devs work at there own pace.
Windows 11 64 bit OS
Intel Core i7-10700
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB
32GB DDR4 RAM