My big problems with this game were that 1. It was missing the 3rd playable character, Guy and 2. No coop. Other than that, it's a standard arcade brawler. Really hard, 'cause it's supposed to suck quarters out of you, but still pretty fun.
The best I ever got, even while using the extra lives cheat was the start of the final level, so yeah, I think at least one more continue wouldn't have been out of the question.
The biggest betrayal in the SNES version of Final Fight is the limited number of continues. Even using the cheat code to get more continues doesn't provide enough to beat a game that, as you said, was explicitly designed to suck quarters out of players' pockets.
