I was fine with where the thread went. Sounds like its old ground for most, but not for me. I'm at the LCD stage. Probably stay there, but who knows, it can become addictive. Using an LCD means I can maintain it myself with little fuss.
I played with artificial scan lines and effects and some are pretty good. The 2600 emulator had various options from single RCA to S-Video. Some was too authentic....blurred too much...was awful....but probably close to an old CRT TV. But overall it triggered the nostalgia a bit more, it looked more like it used to. I did the same with mame and my kids were not happy, they noticed the lines and hated it. This machine is for me and them, so I dropped the fake scan lines.
On a similar note, I did like the Johns Arcade YouTube channel comment that he prefers dedicated cabs because he puts more effort into playing them. When spoilt for choice, you play for 30 seconds...die and swap games. You never try to master them. So at one extreme is the MAME machine with 10,000 games and the other owning just a few single game Cabs. When you'd think the 10,000 would be the logical better choice, but sometimes less is more.