I missed the delivery of my copy today, so tomorrow I'll give infinite lives a shot as well.
Regarding autofire and button assignments, I don't see the big deal, as its the same with the PCB, you just run an autofire board and re-wire the buttons in your control panel/stick manually. I don't foresee this as a problem with my cab setup at all, and neither should anyone else using a custom stick setup. But of course, no infinite lives would be a deal breaker.