There's a lot to be done - granted the majority of pinball failures are mechanical, and they're hard to reduce simply by the fact that you're flinging a heavy m

There's a lot to be done - granted the majority of pinball failures are mechanical, and they're hard to reduce simply by the fact that you're flinging a heavy metal ball at a decent momentum against mechanical components. Some of the actual mechanical designs haven't changed in decades (the flipper mechanics are pretty simple and cheap and well-understood; the payoff in "redesigning" the mechanism has almost no chance to pay off in the long run) but there are improvements that can (and have) been made in overall servicability. Modern machines are easier to access (in general), components are easier to remove (in general) and the diagnostics built into the software are light-years ahead of what used to be typical. While there's still a fair amount of skill in being /good/ at repairing pins, modern pins seem to me to be much easier to maintain by an owner-operator than they've ever been.