I was pleasantly surprised to discover that all of Ann Arbor VFW's lightning flipper games have regular flippers.

If you went back in time and put lightning flippers on White Water (which was released between FT and BSD), people would cry "weak sauce" if you put regular flippers on it today. But we're used to it, so it's okay. None of those games were designed to have lightning flippers.

This could be said of countless games if you put lightning flippers on them. Which is why PAPA sometimes uses them to make tourney games harder, but still playable. We're accustomed to them on a particular handful of games, which began as a sales/marketing alteration but has become gospel.

Whether it's true or not depends on who you want designing your games: designers, or bean counters.

People spend thousand of dollars adding things back to games that designers wanted, but the factory removed. For some reason lightning flippers are sacred. [shrug]