The majority of users on the forum seem to be able to set up their retropie just fine so all I can say is pebcak.

While I will openly admit there are plenty of things retropie can improve on, it is first of all free, so you get what you pay for.

Second of all its open source which means if there is a problem anyone in the community has the opportunity to provide fixes to the source code.

Thirdly there are plenty of people willing to help out on the forum and they will respond much more kindly to constructive feedback rather than criticism, since calling out the people who spend their free time working hard to get things working- at no cost to the user – is probably not the most effective way of solving problems.

And lastly it is quite possible your issues may not even have anything to do with retropie at all considering your issues were constant across the board for all things you tried… Just a thought.