I very much agree. My vision was a ZIP file that when selected in an emulator, could be extracted for instant access, and any save RAM, cheat codes, save states, etc could be stored alongside the game in said folder. It would be bundled with an extensible markup description of the board, and optional pack-in content like box art and user manuals. For games stored on flash memory that could write to themselves (BS Memory, Neo Geo Pocket), this would also prevent the archived, pristene copy from being damaged. The folder would then act like a physical cartridge, and all your game saves would move along with it.

I wrote about my idea here: https://higan.byuu.org/game-paks

It ... was not a popular idea, to put it mildly. I further shot myself in the foot by trying to force the idea on people. You will never win people over with an approach like that.

Let's avoid mentioning names for obvious reasons, but unfortunately those most capable of adopting and promoting such a format through their database effort are unwilling to use ZIP archives in this way. They will only allow for an uncompressed single-file-per-game approach.

As mentioned in my article, this turns into quite the problem. When you take the 8KB program ROM for Galaxian, and append a character ROM for graphics onto it, but your header can only tell you the size of the program ROM in 16KB increments, it means there's no way of specifying where the program ROM ends, and the character ROM begins. Any emulator that supports Galaxian does it via game-specific workarounds like checksum identification.