> Is there a special reason why it is frowned upon?
Mostly, console ports are almost always from really old versions of MAME that are less accurate and wouldn't show our emulation in its best light - these versions often being chosen for performance reasons, that the consoles in question cannot run current MAME versions without fairly large performance hits in comparison to ancient versions. Performance degradation in MAME is a long known issue and mainly due to improvement in emulation accuracy, so it's not even an issue we *WANT* solved.
To a lesser degree, it's because console ports are often made with illegal copies of devkits. With a decent percentage of MAME developers being professional game developers that's not exactly something we can endorse or support. Building MAME should ideally only be done with our supported legal and free toolchains, but does also handle commercial compilers as well of course.
Thirdly, it's not easily a scene we can support through what few tech support forums we do have. There's a large number of dependencies to running illegal binaries sideloaded through various means on the usual consoles, and we typically only support current versions, not ancient ones, as time moves on.
Now, start talking Android and we'll be talking. Bleeding edge MAME on high-end Android hardware (ie. not Raspberry Pi) is becoming possible to the point of nearly becoming a supportable platform. 
- Stiletto
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