I get the feeling behind this (some idiot paid $20k for a non-playable machine?!?), and I don't mean to get philosophical, but how do you separate "collectability" from "fake collectability"? The whole notion of "desirability" and "collectability" is so arbitrary and subjective, I don't know where you'd start to draw a line. People seem naturally inclined to want things in part because others want them, and to then speculate on those things. What could you base it on other than "I don't want one of these, none of my friends want one, and therefore it's a 'fake collectible'"?

I know that I have zero interest in owning a Magic Girl. By all accounts it plays like crap and it would just take up space where a fully functional pinball machine could go. But if someone values owning one as a piece of "pinball history" or just to look at, I couldn't argue them out of that.

Of course to a random dude off the street the whole pinball hobby looks insane anyway. My non-pinball friends would be shocked at what I paid for my players' Sorcerer, let alone at NIB pin pricing.

I get the sentiment and recognize that you know a lot more about making pinball machines than I do. But pinball design seems like a craft where experience is pretty valuable. If I were investing millions to launch a new company, I would want a design team stocked with people that have made pinball machines before (hopefully more than once). Let the newer designer with fresh ideas learn from the seasoned veteran and avoid putting out a clunker of a first title, which might be enough to sink a startup. New blood and new ideas are great, and there has to be some way for new people to get into the design game (even if they'll never have the resources or be able to design the number of titles that someone like Steve Ritchie did in his heyday). But it doesn't make sense to disregard decades of experience and hard-learned lessons in the process.

None of which means that it makes any sense to hire JPop at this point -- that's just nuts.

Cannot argue with you there -- the JPop hiring is inexplicable.

Another key would be an investor who doesn't know what Google is (or better yet, the internet).

Making JPop "the smartest guy in the room"?

You should cross-post this in Levi's Street Fighter II thread. It's been a little slow over there recently.