Fair enough, Moogly. That was a great answer and I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to write such a complete reply. To be clear, while I don't by any means agree with every decision taken by MameDEV, neither do I see you guys as the personification of evil that some seem to. I retract the 'sociopath' comment entirely, it was a response to you suggesting that people who want to use Mame for gaming and complain about dev decisions are 'entitled shitfucks', but it was still an unfair accusation.
I personally aren't interested in HQ filters as artificially-smoothed sprites look hideous and nothing like the games' creators intended. I use HLSL extensively to simulate CRT and vector screens as I want to try and replicate what I experienced in real arcades and of course, baseline Mame supports this. The only feature removed from Mame that I really miss is high-score support, but I really miss it. And yeah, I know it isn't coming back.