By the way, I'm a dirty pirate in this situation. I buy everything else (ESPECIALLY music, I love to support artists, big or small) besides streaming the occasional movie I'm never going to watch twice but I can't justify spending so much money on this - this game gets EXPENSIVE! If they released it at a base price and then released more and more tables for free like pretty much any other game (okay, there's a lot of paid-DLC games these days, but usually at less of a cost), then I would bite. Hell, at least do it like the PS2 days and release some for one game, and then make a sequel or something. Both with a decent honest amount of games on it. Not saying anybody else do it, but that's my take on it.
It's a weird thing, we're paying people who make this game, who are paying people who own the rights to these games, who likely had no position in the pinball businesses when they were in operation, who likely aren't paying any of the original designers, either because they're just not getting any more royalties or because they've been dead for 30 years. Now, I'm not one who can dictate who should and shouldn't get paid for any amount of work, but I don't lose sleep over it - I wouldn't be a customer regardless if it was available through other means or not.
It's a glorified emulator (it literally emulates the factory code, and they link their software up to this and 3D model the playfield, which is where their "job" comes in - and the EMs are coded from scratch which is fairly easy to do as a developer myself), and of course they're going to charge for their work, I just can't justify it. Especially when they want people to pay "special guy" pricing to access one table's operator settings.
Visual Pinball isn't as polished but it's made by pinball fans, includes nearly EVERY game ever invented prior to a certain year, and gives full access to the operator menus - and it's completely 100% free.