Was the magnet part of production JYs? I thought that was dropped to save money.
Sounds like most of the issues you ran into were bad flippers.
Honestly, I don't blame locations for not fixing their games, the economics simply aren't there. You can teach any teenager to swap a joystick and buttons in a cab, which is 90% of the problems that occur on a video game. For a pin, you need a pretty highly trained person to do a lot of the work and troubleshooting.