If corded phones, typewriters, and television knobs were intended to be entertaining pieces of interactive art in their own right there might be an argument here.

Instead, those devices are all merely delivery mediums at best. Pinball machines were/are created by artists with an experience in mind using the tools, influences, and technology available to their given era. I'm no purist, so 'enhance' your own personal experience through mods if it happens to look or function better for you. Go ahead. LEDs run cooler and are certainly brighter, if that's what you're going for - I can't knock them for that.

For older machines though, LED overhauls can wreck the subtlety, visual balance, and playability. Superbrights in a darkened room cause serious eye strain; color zoning washes out a playfield's details; translite loses its glow with spotlights erupting out the back; and, maybe most unfortunately, machines can surrender their identity when all have had the same slap-dash conversion kits that the next artistically bereft modder had.

Here's hoping 2050 doesn't yield a resurrection of our favored machines with revised features to match the times: bulky VR goggles projecting augmented realty automobile ads onto a playing surface with a picture-in-picture display of Facebook, our subdermal emotion chips interacting with multiple pop bumpers triggering both an endorphin release and a cascade of Mountain Dew from an IV unit into our bloodstream. What, you're not cool with hyper-edgy trends grandpa?