Comment by gassi
1000% agree, and we're planning to do just that with Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), a "free service that matches MD5 or SHA1 hashes of ROMs and digital games with metadata providers". There's a cloud version hosted by the project creator, or you can spin up your own instance and source the .DAT files.
Great, looking forward to it!
I’ve used RomCenter and other tools in the past and I’d love to see similar, comprehensive functionality in something more modern.