Safecracker isn't bad; I've had mine pretty-much fully apart.

So far one of the worst I've seen is Apollo 13 (Sega.) But the truth is that in the *modern* era there is no excuse for any of this. Back in the 1970s, 80 and maybe even early 90s there was *some* excuse, but today 3d CAD makes such nonsense utterly inexcusable and abusive. It has also been a major contributor to the "death of pinball" in terms of player satisfaction in commercial environments.

Interference checks are trivial to do with a 3dCAD system, and thus literally everything should be easily removable -- either individually or as an assembly. They're not, but it's not because they can't be, it's because the manufacturers don't spend the time or use 3dCAD. This in turn makes keeping the games working properly a five-alarm PITA, and THAT impacts route earnings (in a BIG and BAD way) because a game that isn't fun never gets the *second* stack of quarters from a player.

Some of the worst offenders are the habitrail ramps and subways; a subway that is of odd shape (and thus cannot be removed laterally; it has to come out perpendicular to the playfield) *and* is crossed by wire loom, frequently in more than one place, becomes a royal pain in the you-know-what to get off. If you can't get it off easily then you can't clean it. Closely followed by this is the never-ending use of shallow (due to playfield depth) wood screws (bad enough) that can of course strip or *stapled* down sockets. The latter might have been ok in the 1950s but couple that with a playfield that has to be basically stripped to get to some of the GI or controlled lights and you have a single bulb change that just turned into an hour-long (or more) project. And finally there is a special place in Hell for designers that nut an assembly together in a place that doesn't allow rational access with anything larger than the nut-driver, and where the assembly of parts makes likely the dropping of one or more small components (e.g. washers, nuts, etc) into inaccessible places. Yes, there are magnetic nutdrivers and I own 'em, but those are not an all-solved answer. One such dropped nut can force disassembly of a major part of the playfield to retrieve it, and you *have to* retrieve dropped metal lest it ultimately go somewhere that results in a short or significant mechanical damage.

Finally, what's with nobody (over how many decades now?) standardizing on some sort of connector system for leaf switches and similar? It's not like they're not in *every* machine. Put a pigtail on them if you want with some sort of Molex or similar with a consistent pin assignment for the grounded side and now playfield wiring and switch maintenance becomes really easy to deal with.

Expecting the average route monkey to deal with these sorts of things is unreasonable; he won't because he can't. And thus the game condition suffers..... something that collectors can deal with and, when we acquire a game can clean up, but for the commercial machine on a route? Nope.