My friend has the Pro version and having the same problem (got his like 2 weeks ago, probably made in the same batch). I called Stern yesterday on his behalf and they just offered to send me some new part. I forget what he called it, but it sounded like it was a newly designed part, as opposed to just a replacement part, but I could have misunderstood and maybe there was just a bad part that was put on the machine originally.

As a side note, my friend mentioned was that when the playfield is up in the air for maintenance, the drop target works flawlessly when manually activated.

I'll try to do some proper documentation here once the part gets here (unless someone beats me to it).

Tried that, didn't have an effect.

I also want to say thanks to everyone here. I too received a replacement part (just the bracket that needs the bending) and it was identical to the one that was installed. We wound up just fixing the installed one and now have a spare. In our case we did the blue bend. It was so far away from the magnet that it would never engage. Honestly I don't why they simply don't do a gap check on these before they leave the factory.

While I can't deny that making the spring shorter/stronger seems to have helped fix this problem for people here, I must say I don't understand how or why. It doesn't make sense. If anything, it should make the problem worse as it's making it harder for the magnet to pull the bracket up. I'm pretty convinced bending this bracket ever so slightly is the solution.

Lastly, I'm not sure how people are bending this, but we removed the two screws that hold the bracket in on the left side. That allowed us to finagle the part out the right side, bend it, and put back in without having to remove anything else.