Quoted from RCA1:

Hey, where did Rog go?

Quoted from Compy:

Shit show aside, I'll interject here as a software engineer that has done a few things in pinball software such as:
1) Demolition Man 2000
2) Python's Pinball Circus (The Circus Maximus Games version)
3) Wizard Blocks
4) Pirates of the Silver Ball redemption for an operator
5) P3 (a game and some of the underlying "system stuff")
and a few others.
Programming pinball from an engineering perspective (IE: how complex the logic is) isn't "hard". For the most part, you can get the logic for a mode done within a few hours after its planned out. Now this is just the PROGRAMMING part of it. This doesn't count the light shows, the DMD/LCD effects, the sounds and the choreography of all three. The basic "rules" aren't that hard to implement from a pure code standpoint.
Standing up a new pinball system IS quite an engineering feat as many people don't learn anything about real-time programming or hardware interfaces anymore. The most they get is an introductory "architecture" class that covers basic AND/OR/NOT gates and how to make bit adders. Most people coming out of college CS programs aren't even familiar with the concepts of bank switched memory or IRQ. So, the initial development of a pinball operating system/hardware platform IS a bit complicated. Thankfully systems like the P-ROC and its associated software frameworks make this a lot easier. However, that system level development only needs to happen ONCE.
Pinball IS difficult from the creativity standpoint, though. When you're a programmer, you've got to flex both sides of your brain. Most programmers that are put in charge of user interfaces on modern day webapps tend to make rather crappy user experiences. I'm guilty of it. Pinball programmers often have to have both sides of the creativity coin since they're often put in charge of a lot of the rules implementation as well.
Again, the logic isn't hard by itself, but when you have to do that in addition to the other creative tasks within pinball, or you've got to worry about the low level hardware aspects of the game, it can get a bit complex compared to what the current mainstream software engineers are taught.