Hey, I'll try to be as straightforward as possible. Devs don't make MAME difficult to use because they hate users. It's difficult to use because a command-line application happens to be the simplest application one can make. Therefore it's easy to setup and make changes to the MAME application code. It's easy to add new features like shaders and slot devices and the like. A more user friendly UI would make this development much more difficult and much slower. This simple interface has allowed MAME and MESS to develop quite rapidly. It's pretty amazing how many systems the emulators supports and how well the emulator runs. It means more systems and games for YOU, the user. Time is the cost for developing MAME, and so the devs have decided to spend that time on the emulators themselves rather than the UI. Nobody's against you, it's just how things work out. You'll notice Windows games don't usually use the Windows GUI either. They usually have their own in-game interface. That's not too different from what MAME has right now.