In the words of Sinstar, "Beware, I live"
As I mentioned in the previous post, I started over with lr-mame2000 (MAME 0.37b5 as a Libretro core) on RetroPie 4.7.1 (current). While mame4all-pi is supposed to be faster, it doesn't do me any good if it doesn't support rotation. It also became obvious that mame4all-pi is basically an unsupported hack.
Once I started over I tried the recommended solution of disabling the internal "soundcard" without success, like