Quoted from vid1900:

First get the word "problem" out of your head, so you can think clearly.
There is no problem.
Anyone that operated games back in the day, will tell you that all new games dimple.
It's only the nubies that believe a piece of wood is going to be harder than a piece of steel because someone sprayed a .004" coating of urethane on it.

EVERYTHING is amplifying the effect.
New playfields are polished and waxed at the factory - the shinier something is, the more ANY imperfection stands out.
New games are brightly lit - old games had almost no lighting. Xenon had 16 GI lamps and the playfield is mostly black.
New games have no-glare, super-clear glass. Old games had green soda-lime glass.
New games now have crystal-clear sprayed on coatings. Old games had either silkscreened lacquer or cloudy Diamondplate coatings.
New games are new, so every little dimple stands out. You see a tiny scratch or dent in your new car and it drives you crazy because it stands out. Your 10 year old car that you gave to your daughter has hundreds of tiny dents and scratches, but you don't notice them at all.
New games are steeper and have as many ramps as they can squeeze onto a playfield. Ramps need powerful flippers. Balls fly everywhere, often after hitting the glass. Old games had noting like that - Comet in 1986 was the first game where the ball would regularly hit the glass and then break all the plastics.
New games will take much longer to get enough plays to flatten out. Any old game that did not pay for itself in 3 months was a dog. Nowadays people talk about a 6 year payback.
I would put mechanical counters in my route games because they could not be reset - the electronic counter BETTER match pretty closely to my mechanical counter, or I'm getting ripped off.
Games in good locations would get 30,000 plays a year.
Even when I've taken my games to Expo, they only got about 700 plays
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