Quoted from Winball_Pizard:FT is a difficult game with lightning flippers and close shots. It will bring the pain if you are into that sort of thing
IIRC, there's a TOPcast episode where Mark Ritchie stated he designed the game with regular WMS bats--not Lightning flips.
Apparently, WMS caved to a big European Op's request for shorter ball times--and prototypes had regular flippers while production games shipped with Lightnings.
Thus explaining the long-standing debate about which to use.