Shadow is one of the best games ever. Great modes, additional goals to get to Final Battle, Final Battle itself is cool, smart layout with fast loops & lots of shots, Battlefield, unique ramp diverters that add a strategic twist no other pin has.

They share great sound, a cool magnet trick and challenging gameplay but TS is a huge and diverse package while BSD is extremely one tracked in my opinion.

BSD is fun, but this is no contest at all to me, Shadow wins my a mile in every aspect.

The ball lock. This guy is hitting it on his first shot:

Well, the thing is that the loop shot has a what is probably a bug: The scoring on that shot is not capped, means it gets more and more valuable each time you hit it. Not sure if anyone ever managed to max out that score, but it seems to be infinite.

At least Bowen (who made the video about this strategy) has done a good job luring the other players into trying that strategy - and defeating them by miles if they take the bait. I've tried and tried and tried to get good scores out of the loop strategy but won't even come close to the scores I have when playing a "normal" game.

Still, due to the infinite scoring bug in a tournament setting BSD might be a better choice.

Then again, to me tournament play has very little to do with enjoyable pinball as usually the main goals of the game are ignored anyway.

I think the main reason why everyone is failing with that strategy is that Bowen compared it to two other ridiculous strategies: Only going for Vengeance and only going for the Battlefield. Out of these three, the loop strategy scores highest (IF you can hit the shots consistently that is).
He's not taking playing modes into account at all, which is were the huge points are usually coming from.