Like I said, out of all the front ends that don't have problems and work "out of the box", can you see a common thread there? How about: They all only work with MAME.
Yes, people, it's not easy making any kind of software to begin with beyond your simple "hello world" textbook example. Not only that, but something as complicated as a multiple emulator frontend that relies on other programs to do it's dirty work (list generation, for example).
Okay, Paige, distributing
another DAT file for a front end is probably not the right answer. Not only does it create an extra maintenance task for our overworked FE Devs, but it's just one extra step that replicates information that's already freely available.
I think what the main problem is, is that most of the time when us users use a front-end, we expect it to be retail-quality software. Unfortunately this is not the case, and in fact, most of the time we're dealing with BETA or sometimes ALPHA quality software that's just released ("advertised") as full-fledged retail-quality software. I think what really needs to happen is the FE devs need to start being clearer on what a release is.
MAMEWAH 1.50, as good as it is, has already gone through 3 or 4 fixes for various (serious!) problems in the past month. That's BETA, man.
In order to get out of non-beta and have a "real" release (with a release party! w00t!) you need to QA it first, test everything, even if you don't think you've touched it, fix anything that you broke, then release it to the public and have them do the same thing. Rinse, repeat.
Kymaera has consistently been in this category, but it's a relatively new endevour.
Dragon King.. is probably in "full release" mode, but part of that is just that Howard refuses to fix his bugs
Otherwise DK definitely shows it's wisdom, if not it's age.
Really we need to get better QA going on for the software, even if that means the devs released "beta" versions for us to test before they release "real" versions. Or better yet, open source it like Kymaera and let other people do the work for you.
-Steve