Turns out I'm not alone and there are no intentions to make 'non-modern conforming layouts' (Things that don't fit to a 360 or dualshock pad's layout) less confusing, unfortunately. Thinking maybe I just didn't understand what I wanted I looked it up and found a feature request over the same thing. I'm far from new in games, technical challenges, and tinkering with games/emulators/hardware, and I just gave up and used a different emulator.
IE any console that uses a 6 button controller (Sega Saturn) is incredibly confusing to set up properly, especially if using an actual 6 button controller along with it. Personally I find RetroArch to be usually fairly nice - albeit sometimes confusing if something isn't working properly - except when using it for a core with a 'not modern' amount of controller buttons. The cores are the actual emulators and are not technically part of RetroArch. To anyone that doesn't know, RetroArch is actually just a frontend that implements the download, management and use of 'libretro' cores, along with configuring and loading roms etc. I'd be surprised if this was released non-janky, it'd almost have to be the same as this article mentions with the core updater being disabled.
