I'm a member of this club as well. And I completely agree about this being an under the radar game. I had never played it before I bought it, and was surprised at how fast and fun it is. I picked mine up as a non working project; wouldn't boot, lifted and cupped inserts, broken plastics and filthy.
I have fixed the really bad inserts and will go through the rest when I have time. The only issue I struggle with now is getting speech to work. Hopefully i will have thst worked out in the next few,weeks. My cab needs a lot of love and someday I will get around to scanning it in and sending to pinball pimp to get some stencils made.

I like your idea of the ramp gate in the horseshoe. If you want to add a little more speed to the game, take the gates off the ramps.

The big blue inserts on mine where so warped when I got the pin they were almost completely out. I baked them in the over for about 20 minutes at 200, flipped them upside down and pressed them flat. It took about 3 times of doing that to get them flat and level. I wet sanded them and they look as good as possible but they have tons of hairline cracks inside. I'm sure there is a technical term for it but no clue what it is. I am going through the rest of the inserts now due to cupping. The ball keeps jumping over the flippers and drains. Still the pin I end up playing the most. It's just so damn much fun.

Decided to put my Lightning up for sale to make room for anot her pin.
https://pinside.com/pinball/market/classifieds/ad/40148

Sounds like there is something stuck in memory. I remember having a similar issue on mine and it went away when I installed NVRam and cleared all of the audit settings.

The biggest problem with multi ball is that you can re-lock balls while in multi ball. I may have kept mine longer if it would kick out the ball while you're still in multi ball.