Planned obsolescence in pinball control boards? ROFL.

There are a good number of these node board shutdowns that happen because someone puts mods in their games and exceeds the power budget for the item they connected the mod to. There are much more advanced ways of dealing with overcurrent these days than using a one-time-blown fuse. Spike 2 has opted to make use of those newer methods. I'd imagine they are still dialing in the firmware to surface all of these errors more effectively so the end user doesn't just think their node board failed.

The interchangeability of node boards isn't that hard either, and doesn't need a chart. Node boards 8 are interchangeable on any Spike system of the same generation (spike 1 vs spike 2), same with node 9. Node boards with a letter after them, like 8a, are light or feature boards specific to that game.

Vid gets it.

Power budgets are an engineering best practice.

https://chrisgammell.com/what-is-a-power-budget/

Just because you can leech as much power as you want from other pin systems doesn't mean they were designed better.

Ask those manufacturers. They should be able to tell you the exact draw of all their products.