not sure you'll get much commentary. the process you discovered is sort of the initiation ritual for MAME'ing, which seems to be the status quo for the "community" (not just this board) .. "figure it out for yourself. if you can't, you don't deserve to know". That attitude is OK, as long as the resources exist to do so. In diving into this a few months ago, I found endless amounts of dead links, forum posts with old or entirely bad information, 45 page threads with the answer buried somewhere in the middle, etc.
welcome to the club.