Hmm, in my experience the are lots of people in the emulation community who just enjoy to get things to work. So the fun comes from building up the romsets, setup the hardware, setup the emulator, test if the games are working, dial in the config for edge cases, maybe layer on a crt-shader, package everything behind a frontend, etc.

They rarely play through an entire game and instead just test out one of the thousands of roms they showed on to their handheld for a few minutes.

Yes, i’m talking also about myself. But after 10 years in the ‘hobby’ this seems to be pretty common.