It's not messy, and it's plug and play, but it's a hack. If your games are resetting when all your games are on, you don't have enough juice to turn your game on. Shows, auction, same deal, not the end of the world to run it a couple days, but we all know that's not how this product is going to be used.

If I'm buying a game, and I see this product on the machine, the game is worth a 5V troubleshooting process less to me.

The OP shouldn't come out and say the watchdog circuit is fully intact, it's not. He admits that there are components that are no longer on it after installing his device.

With even the cheapest DMD games going for around $2K, but a lot of them $4K, $6K+, what's another $125 and a little patience to either send the boards out and get it fixed right or call your local tech?

We've disagreed on this before. You are in favor of getting games running in the cheapest and easiest way possible. I have the opinion that there is a right way to fix the games, it might not be the cheapest or easiest, but to fix them as closely to original as possible. This isn't any more of a hack than when you were advocating installing switching power supplies to bypass +5V issues (or was it another voltage issue, I don't remember), this is probably better, less components to fail.

Beefing up traces is not the same as routing power from elsewhere and taking components off the watchdog circuit. A better example would be the resister fix that Clay advocates to slightly increase the voltage on the circuit. However, he advocates that as a last resort and is placed earlier in the circuit, not sure how much, but it's still a better "hack" than this.

Some hacks are better than others, this is better than some like a power supply, but not as good as the resistor hack. It's still a hack though, and not in a good way.

Isn't the best tool to test for this a DMM and 15 seconds to check for +5V on the CPU board?