I made a fucking console from the ground up. I didn't do it to be easy -- I did it because I could, and now I have something unique that is amazing to use, gorgeous to look at, runs everything up to Dreamcast/Dolphin with ease. And anyone can do it with the STLs I give away.
It even supports bluetooth audio but I will admit getting that to work was the only pain point of the whole build, but mostly because my un-official build didn't have bluetooth support out of the box for audio so I needed to install the pipewire service and enable audio to the bluetooth device. Still only took a few minutes to work out.
Sorry you're dumb. All you need for retropie is a RP4 and a SD card. The image burns directly to the SD card, insert, power on, play games.