And it's understandable! Trust me, before I started the whole Vita RA thread when I used it on Android, I thought it was horrendous. I swore up and down that separate emulators with varying simpler frontends were the future. It's why the Retroarch Twitter page still has my personal account blocked, because dumb Seongs are dumb.
But, if you give it a few days, you'll find that it's pretty easy to use. And with GLUI working on the Vita side, it's a far more thematically appropriate frontend than XMB since it's faster with less fluff. Honestly, after using RA, I can never go back to a traditional separate emulator setup like I had before (Except for some desktop stuff like Dolphin or Cemu, for varying reasons).
But hey, to each their own.