Quoted from Roostking:This is why they just need to use CPR playfields and be done with it. If they have to tack on $50 to the price to cover the cost, so be it. Thats not admitting anything, thats just making production line changes. But they wont, cause Stern doesnt care.
This is the best possible solution, but unlikely to happen (as you say).
Even if Stern was willing to OEM CPR PF's, the big gotcha is keeping up with Stern demands. Scaling up CPR level quality is certainly doable, but the company as it exists today is unlikely to meet Stern's PF demands while maintaining their impeccable level of quality.
If Stern were motivated to raise their game (which is actually just returning to the quality they had once-upon-a-time), they could do this without delegating to CPR. This isn't rocket science...this is purely a numbers game.
Quoted from seenev:But how many of those people will suddenly start caring when Stern tacitly admits that their playfields are cheap and defective, but that you can get a decent playfield for even more money? Admitting that they cheap out on the most important part of a machine and then trying to use that to extort even more money from customers would not go over well...
But then again, we're all stupid.
This long winded post is about quality issues with PF's...almost all are aesthetic (warping being an exception, and is obviously a wood quality issue).
Stern offers 3 flavors of games, 3 price points. People get to choose their feature level & price. If people are willing to dish out almost 2k more for an LE, and get almost nothing but exclusivity, armor and early access, why not offer people "quality" options? The existing PF's are far from total shit (my JP2 PF's have held up great and didn't have any flaws I'm aware of). Seems like the likelihood of getting a lemon with all the defects discussed in this post is 10-20%. And operators largely buying Pro's could care less about the aesthetic defects...the existing PF's are fine for location play.
Listen, if Stern really cared about home collectors (and that's a big "if"), their games would reflect what the community wants. Ideally, all Premiums and LE's would have superior, quality-checked PF's. Doing PF swaps is impractical for 98% of the home collector population. When Stern sends out unpopulated PF's, it's really a pacifier, since those PF's will never be installed (which is just waste, not a solution).