it's called pro because it's for professionals or people who like to spend 5 min to follow a tutorial. I boycott photoshop because it takes hours to draw a circle doesnt it?
No really...you don't to manually create a dat. Yes, you need some basic knowledge about rom storing and terms like "merging", parent/clone relationships, biossets and devices.
1) Profiler, creates you a database based on your MAME binary (if prompts appear, 'answer yes to all') 2) Settings, drag'n drop or import your rompaths 3) Scanner, hit the scan button
That's it. With this procedure it tells you what is wrong with your collection without touching it. Then you can enable the fix options (1 click) and do the fixing...
If you get a "bad exe output" it simply means that your MAME binary is not ok (not using an official build? bad self compiled build or locked by the system) and MAME most likely crashes when -listxml is run or it produces a bad xml output.