Quoted from rosh:Seems to me that rather than spend a ton of engineering time and a add a big chunk to the BOM on something to make it easier to repair the machine, it would be better to have put that engineering and BOM towards making the machines well built and reliable from the start, so you would not need some fancy and expensive playfield lift assembly (or glass assembly). The ultimate goal should be to make it so the owner never needs to remove the glass other than to occasionally wipe down the playfield, let alone needing to lift the playfield..
Well, there's also something to be said about going too far in the opposite direction like Stern was doing for a while.
In general, I think the best design to date has been capcom's mech, with the WPC-95 mech being second (although I have to admit I haven't really been under the hood on AP and later JJP games, so I can't really comment on those). Pin 2k was also interesting, just because the rails didn't limit where you could set the playfield down on the front edge of the cab. Wasn't there also something unique about for safe cracker?