That's the thing. People obviously will be recording their games. That's now an extra step. A step that's not necessarily easy for everyone. Ease of recording is nice to have in tournaments where you are playing over 20 games, and recording hundreds of times.
It didn't change in 0.185 though? Unless you just mean anything after 0.106. I'm not sure why we're talking about 0.185 when the tournament is using 0.183?
Packages of WolfMAME still have the record.bat and playback.bat files to make things less scary. When using a command line, maybe the hardest part of the whole process is just navigating to where you have MAME stored, and I agree that sucks if you're not well-versed in command lines. Maybe I'm biased because I was using DOS back in the early 90's. But once you're there all you have to do is type "record rallyx rallyx" or whatever and you're good to go. Got another game to record for the tournament? You're already in the directory, so "record bongo bongo". Doesn't seem too difficult to me?
As for recording hundreds of times? If you're still in the command prompt and want another attempt but you already hit Esc, all you have to do is press Up on the command prompt window to repeat the last command, and then Enter. Couldn't be simpler! Way faster than using a GUI. If you want a super-fast restart in-game, press F3 to do a normal reset and kill the recording, then Shift-F3 to automatically hard reset MAME and start a new recording. I don't think that's even possible in wolf106! (seriously, some people need to stop using 0.106 already for the love of god)