This isn't an option, but I would rather you pick two early SS games, two early 80s games, two late 80s games, a System 11, and at least one DMD from each manufacturer. It would be far more interesting to see the evolution of rules and attempt to frame them as that so you can develop general playing strategies then it would be to dive into just one era.

If you have to dive into just one era, do modern Sterns only because they are the mostly likely to be seen in tournaments nowadays.

It has serious software issues that would keep it out of a tournament. I forget what they are offhand, but I really like the game... but I would never buy one for that exact reason.

I don't know - personally, if I know that there are big software issues with the rules, then if I'm playing a game specifically for score, I'm very likely to NOT play that particular title. There are games that have software issues that I can overlook and just have fun on - Monopoly and NGG are the two that come to mind - but I don't really have interest in learning to exploit rules on a machine that I know has issues with it's rules anyway.

I'd rather they take the rulesets of games that I'm more likely to really want to figure out how to score higher on.

I'd also like to request maybe purposely NOT doing the "usual heavyweights." Don't give me TAF, AFM, MM, TZ, LOTR and SM. Pick games that are sort of similar, and then say, "This game plays like _______." so you can look for similarities in strategies.

As a for instance, show me how to play a DE title, and you pretty much show me what the DE strategy is for most of the games in the early 90s. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE DE titles, but it's shocking how similar a lot of the rulesets really are. Explaining one in depth, and saying there are similar features on these other DE titles from the era will give me a much better background knowledge of how to play that era game then showing me how Tommy, TFTC, JP and LAH all are basically the same ruleset with different playfields.