Yikes. No personal experience, but Neo's work looks good over here:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/a-playfield-restoration-step-by-step-walk-through

Have you tried playing it yet? It's fun. Doesn't mean you'll want to own one, of course, but drop in a Loonie and try it out if you see one on route (if it's like the States, should be plenty of them out there).

Stern's written warranty does not cover cabinet decals. Or the playfield. At all. In practice, Stern covers many more things, including ghosting playfield inserts, defective/peeling decals, etc. The written warranty is really quite limited, take a look and you'll be amazed given the amount of warranty-type service Stern actually provides for its machines.

I don't think Stern has ever publicized its "limits" (time, number of previous owners, number of issues reported on single machine, etc.) for offering customer support that falls outside of the written warranty. It would be surprising if they did, since they seem to want to maintain a "case by case" standard and that's harder to do once you make promises in writing.

So as with any issue with decals/playfield/etc., you should contact your distributor and ask if Stern's willing to do something. Even years after purchase people seem to have had good luck getting covered for things like board issues. Probably less so for "cosmetic" issues like decals and playfield defects, but you won't know until you ask.

Good luck! Worst case do what Neo says and buy yourself a colored marker. It won't look quite as nice but will save you the trouble of re-decaling your cabinet.

The written warranty says "Warranty periods are effective from the initial date of shipment from [Stern] to its authorized distributors." Doesn't matter in your case, of course, because the written warranty does not cover decals, playfield, or anything other than "printed circuit boards" and "dot matrix display boards." But again, in practice Stern covers these items for longer than the warranty states, and covers a bunch of other things as well ...

Bingo! Their written warranty is still what you'd give if all of your customers were commercial operators routing machines. Since that's no longer the case, Stern provides much more warranty service than is written on the page. But as you say, it is "nebulous."

If Stern still has the decals in stock (and they probably do for a game that new), I'd bet they would sell you one even if you cannot get your distributor to get you one for free.

Here's a link with the JJP and CGC (AFMr) written warranties, take a look and see what you think:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/stern-pinball-60-day-warranty-lets-talk-warranties/page/2#post-3938048
To summarize, they're somewhat more generous than Stern's written warranty but still not nearly as generous as Stern's actual practice in providing warranty coverage (I gather JJP, like Stern, has also sometimes provided service outside of the written warranty period, don't know about CGC).

Did you try contacting your distributor? 100% of the reports are that that is what you should do, instead of contacting Stern directly. Your distributor has influence with Stern that you as an individual buyer do not.

Go to your distributor now, I'd bet they can get your decal for you.

Good luck! I hope they get you fixed up.

After adjusting for inflation, what percentage of B/W games sell for more than their original price today? 2%?

As to those 2% though, the answer clearly must be "theme integration." Which I guess is this week's "world under glass."

No dispute re: costs continuing to rise for new pinball owners, but I question the "condition wise" thing. I would guess that it's much harder to find beat up (and cheap) versions of pre-2000 games than it used to be, because so many of them have now been cleaned up, fixed up, or restored. So while the average TZ or IJ isn't selling for $2,500 anymore, it's also probably in significantly better shape than the average TZ or IJ you would have bought 20 years ago.

Insert ghosting is an ongoing and significant problem that Stern needs to figure out. It's not clear what percentage of games its happening on, but it pisses off customers and must cost Stern plenty to do populated playfield swaps. Likewise, incomplete code support cannot be helping their business any.

Was there something beside the concerns about seam splitting/cracking? That was super lame, but with SW Stern is now reinforcing the hell out of the cabinet corners so that particular issue shouldn't be repeated.

The decal peeling was also very lame, but is that still being reported? I guess I wrote that off as growing pains when they switched to the new facility and new manufacturing processes, but if it's still happening that's not cool.

Yeah, I'm not trying to convince you to buy a NIB Stern (or any NIB game, for that matter). It's much more reasonable to wait a few months, see how the games are actually doing in the wild, and then pick up a HUO at a slight discount that you can actually look at and play before buying, regardless of the manufacturer. Of course if we were reasonable, none of us would be buying pinball machines in the first place!

I was just curious if those particular issues (cabinet and decals) were really still going on. The insert ghosting and lack of code support are still pretty glaring black eyes for Stern.

I hear Street Fighter II has a novel layout. Worth a look?