Think this is doing them a disservice. They're clearly different than plain overlays, which have been a thorn in the side of the restoration community for a while now.

Also...clearing a playfield quiets the noise of the ball rolling around too. When I first played my Space Shuttle with the CPR playfield, it was just eerily quiet. I didn't like it. I'll still take the benefits of clearing/hardtop over NOT, but...yeah...that part is just weird to me!

Yes, but the entire point is that in most cases, hardtop are covering things that either haven't been run or won't be run again. I mean...you want to find me a NOS Future Spa playfield? Lemme know when you get one! Firepower is an odd bird, with prior repros, FACTORY re-runs like this one, and now hardtops.

I think there's always a market for niche stuff like your PF regardless of what they're doing. If I had a FP, I'd love to have this PF in it. Unique/oddball playfields are great! I personally don't think 1k is ludicrous for it, but my opinion often differs vastly from the market, so...

I'd believe under 10.. as far as I can remember, I haven't seen but maybe one other one of these in the 6 years I've been in the hobby.

I don't disagree. Hardtops should really only be installed on already-roached playfields with big patches of wear or extreme planking IMO. Which should...you would think...be able to be found with minimum effort and cost reasonably. I have noticed several instances of people saying they were going to put a hardtop on and other people going "HEY WTF TRADE ME THAT AWESOME PLAYFIELD BEFORE YOU SCREW IT UP!"

Fireball 2 is such an underappreciated game.

I've had bad luck with ME, unfortunately. I've taken it out of my toolkit until I get some trash to practice on. What I'm talking about though is like actual wood planking and potentially delamination if it's bad enough. Like it's split through the wood and you can see the actual gap. I think hardtop would be great for that, where if you tried to clear it, you'd be doing a million layers to level it out. Anyways, this convo is fun, but I don't want to distract your sale! I bet it won't be for sale for long though.