There's a reason why months of field testing that JJP do (and Dutch did) should be standard practice, and why Stern mostly ceasing it (not even a few weeks of location testing on some new games) and others not doing it at all should be very worrisome.
Having seen the fallout of lack of testing, and insufficient revision in the past year, and realised just how heavily corners are being cut, I'd be very wary of buying games that are either not long, long into their production cycles (ideally at least a year) or which have not been heavily location tested prior to production. Some new machines coming to market are receiving essentially no long term durability or stress testing (albeit I imagine Stern must still do some on automated test rigs in house).
Good on JJP for not pulling the game when pf damage started to occur, for PR reasons, and keeping it going, to see how bad the problem would become. That's vital data.