I've had mine about 18 months. I did need to do a few things to it when I acquired it. But since then, it's been trouble free.

It's not the easiest pin in the world to work on - it's just hard to get to a lot of the problematic areas (VUK's, tombstone motor) with the playfield upright in the cabinet. When I was working on mine (at the beginning) I found it much easier to set up a couple sawhorses next to the machine and lift the playfield out and set it on its' side on the sawhorses. There is enough play in the wire loom so you can do this without unhooking anything.

But I think that "complaint" is typical DE, and not specific to TFTC. It's a great game. It took me several months to actually get into it (tweaking the setup, slope, etc) but there's a ton of stuff to do. If you can find a good example at $1500, I think it's a steal compared to the other options out there. I probably wouldn't sell mine for that though.