I won't argue that most comp sci. grads not being up to par. You either have the knack or you don't and no amount of schooling is going to help much.

I really think that all the controls need to be setup with something like a P-ROC and have a laptop control everything. This I believe would be good for the operator since he could just swap out laptops instead of trying to narrow down whats wrong with the boards and modders could basically do whatever they want and program the pinball in whatever they want. On top of that, it would be easier to find programmers to write could for the pinballs because they could do it in C/C++ or Java or whatever and probably be able to put together pinball ball editor programs to allow for people to change things without needing to know a lot about programming. It would not be hard to imagine that it would be easy for Stern to develop some sort of package that made it simple to setup a pin. It would make it simpler on their end and shift the focus from writing clean code to writing interesting and fun code. There really isn't a lot that changes from pin to pin so the package could be reused over a over. People are already running pinball machines with a P-Roc and using a mame emulator so just gutting a machine and running with a laptop isn't a giant leap of any kind.

I really too think that if you are going to bring LCD screens into the picture, too, there are amazing things that hobbyist could do with the machine everything was controlled by a pc.