Actually I honestly don't understand why the MAME Devs just don't devote everything to a UI version..
How about:
-Because they're more interested in emulating the arcades, not working on a GUI.
-There are dozens of great FEs, so why reinvent the wheel. Especially when many people favor them over mameUI's GUI.
-Developing for mame is much faster if you call mame from the commandline or even seperate FE, instead of from an integrated GUI.
but the regular MAME seems user friendly now anyway now.. no dos commands it seems
Yup, haven't been any dos commands since 0.36b14 (May of 2001).
Mame32 from my understanding was for Windows because it was 32-bit.. but now that Windows is moving to 64-bit (can you run a 32 bit version of windows on a 64 bit processor such as an athlon 64??) it would get confusing so they just renamed it.
Not quite.
Back when mame32 first came out (0.26.1), the official mame was still 16 bit dos (AFAIK).
However, "mame32" became a misnomer soon after when official mame was compiled as a
32 bit dos app (not sure when that happened), but the name still stuck.
The misnomer stuck even after official mame became a windows application (commandline, yes, but still a 100% 32 bit windows app).
Finally the name changed when mame & especially mame32 started having official releases in both 32 & 64 bit versions. Instead of having "mame32(32)" & "mame32(64)" or whatever else they might have been called, the name was changed to a less confusing and more correct name that (IMO) it should have changed to six to seven years ago.
If you don't need to update for any particular game then no, no need to update
Agree.