I think you misunderstood what you quoted. JJ is saying the reason they had to move the switch out of the cab was because there was no transformer in the cab anymore, which is not the case for JJP. Only Stern and the standards guys know for sure if this was a requirement to move the switch or not, or if it was fully up to Stern.

But the good news is, everyone here is an expert on UL and FCC certification for electronics and the specifics of Spike design, not to mention were involved in the certification process, so I feel pretty comfortable agreeing with the group think that it was moved only to save .75 of wiring and Stern are a bunch of dirty liars who take a perverse joy in making people reach for the switch in the head. I think they did it so the could stand behind people and ogle.

Some node boards (possibly all coil driver ones, didn't look too closely) on my GB do have fuses and transistors, so I don't think it is reasonable to assume that all node board issues are going to require a full node board replacement. However I do agree that prices on node boards and the cpu board are higher than I would like in case you do need a replacement. In a perfect world Stern would sell them for just above cost, or offer a low cost exchange program for first two years or something like that until Spike issues are ironed out and the community gets more comfortable.

Not sure if Stern has or is planning to release full schematics for all the boards. It would also be nice to have a definitive list of spike boards, part numbers with game compatibility. There has been discussion that node boards aren't compatible from one game to another, but maybe it is a case of boards not being upwards compatible, but new revisions would be backwards? I dunno, but I think in this case with this new architecture and the lack of published information is making things worse. Hopefully this will improve in the future. I do know that I miss the big schematic pages in the manual. Had no idea what they meant, but having them around was comforting