Advice on an arcade only build please

I have a small bartop I built a while back, it has a trackball, joystick, six player buttons plus six admin. Everything electronics wise works just fine. But I have never really been happy with it. At the moment it has a raspberry pi inside of it, I recently picked up an OK computer and a nice monitor that I think will replace the pi. So, that is the platform...

I have tried a number of ready-made retropie images--I have not been happy with any of them.

The problem seems to boil down to everything tries so hard to support various game controllers and decisions are made with that goal in mind. Once you look at RetroArch, annoying things happen like the XYBA button placement--which is illogical in a game of frogger. I really want an Arcade Only build with a joystick and 6 buttons. I do not need or want to support any hand held controller. I also do not need any console emulators or roms. I may want to add Daphne games, but that is as 'out there' as I will get.

What I do want is a clean menu system to allow me to pick from a limited number of Arcade games. I expect between 100 and 200 on the final machine.

Can anyone give me some straight forward advice on putting together this basic Arcade machine?

Just throwing this out there but have you tried Attractmode?

http://attractmode.org/