MUGEN?

I've heard of mugen for a while now, and I finally decided to give it a shot after seeing some cool youtube fights in it. But now I can't find sites for characters. And the majority of sites I find are poorly-made geocities/yahoo premades. Other than that, there seems to be plenty of french sites, but their character links lead to the shitty geocities sites.
3=

mame is a retarded bitch, so far. I download it, and 3 games, and mame.exe tells me to try launching it from the command prompt, but mame is not listed because it came in a 7zip archive, and just sits on my desktop. Looking at the config file pisses me off, because why the fuck can't anyone have the sense to make their fucking projects more like VBA? It sits in a folder on my desktop, and I click and drag the games I want to play onto it. All the options I could possibly need at on the toolbar. The save files are right in the VBA folder.
Seriously, why is VBA the only emu I've tried that's not totally fucking retarded?