Personally, I find the top 100 to be useful for a couple of reasons. However, I don't consider it to be authoritative in the least. It is a crowd sourced stack ranking based upon individuals who have limited access to a subset of games over different periods of time.

First rule of top 100 is not to get offended that your games aren't as high on the list as you want them to be, and games you can't stand are. For many of the games, their Pinside ranking has nothing/little to do with their market value.

Second rule is to use the top 10-20 as a menu when considering what new pins you would like to evaluate to add to your collection. Rather than trying to remember what all is out there from each of the current manufacturers, you can browse through higher ranked pins as a starting point for your research. I like doing this before my local pinball show (TPF), so I can make a list of the newer games that I want to make sure I play.

Just because others like a particular pin for whatever reasons doesn't mean you will, but don't get offended by it. None of those pins or manufactures wins any trophies for being at the top of the list.

Another idea would be to have a top 25 list that is measured differently. Instead of having users rate pins randomly, you have each participant actually rank 1-25 from a list of the top 100 pins. This way, every participant actually ranks all of the machines. You would then simply tabulate scores by assigning values to rank (e.g. 1 point for a first position ranking, 2 for a second position, etc.) From here, the pin with the lowest total would be ranked #1, the next lowest #2, etc.

Not saying to replace the top 100, but this would be an interesting addition to see how the two different methods would compare.