"making this one of only two pinball games to use 1" balls."
Which was the other then ?
About the FG mini playfield, I remember reading an interview with Pat Lawlor that he spent a lot of time working on it to get it right so it feels like regular pinball.
Imo going to a 1 inch pinball could be done and probably is the only reasonable way to do it. Lot of playfield parts can still be the used (or be changed later).
If you go much smaller then it's a total redesign of every part without knowing if it will still feel right.
I do find that parts like popbumpers are (too) large. The typical setup of 3 bumpers takes up a large part of the playfield. On electromechanical games this didn't matter as they usually didn't have a lot of other assemblies to fill the playfield, but nowadays they could replace it by smaller popbumper assemblies to make room.
