> Why waste all that time and effort to fix something that wasn't broke? Just to make > it easier on the eye?
Just to make it easier on the eye? Your joking right?
Sounds to me that you have never worked in a team dev environment, or at least appreciate the issues with a demanding large scale project.
OOP was designed mainly to standardise coding practices with the idea to re-use as much of the code as possible in an organised object based fashion.
How can that be a bad thing for a large scale and complex project such as MAME or MESS?
Where this benefits most for the existing devs, is by making the code more attractive for new devs to take part and to be able to re-use code from other sources (as already mentioned).