My Sterns (‘04-present) have generally been more reliable than my 90’s DMDs. I was initially concerned about Spike, but I’m up to 3 Spike games now and they’re mostly great. What’s really cool is that instead of having fuses, they will just shut down that subsystem if a fault is detected. Once you remove the fault, they just start working again. Older Sterns (SAM and Whitestar) tend to have problems with optos, but those are easy to fix.
Better sound and displays are also a plus in the “new Stern” column. But I’ll buy any game that’s reasonably priced and fun to play. The last pin I bought was a $900 Jungle Queen, and I’m loving that.