@paffley Glad to hear you got everything working.
Regards metadata, have you tried Steven Selph's Scraper?
You could try using the scraper on your PC . Download the relevant version here and place the binary in a folder containing your roms. They can be from any system but not a mixture of MAME and consoles as they use different databases.
Running the scraper will create a gamelist.xml file and a folder containing boxart which you can place in your roms folder on your pi. If you want to keep your scraped data in configs/all/emulationstation, then you have to use the -image_path flag (or use the find and replace facility in a text editor).