That's true. You don't have enough time to readjust your shot timing at a tournament. We all know this stuff is critical and instinctive in competition. I have yet to play with any Superbands but I could easily see having them at home being a negative when it comes to competitive play elsewhere. It's hard enough to adjust to the idiosyncracies of someone else's instance of your game. Add in totally different flipper rubbers and that could be enough to move you from top ten to top thirty.

Why should that matter? If you get decent pieces of rubber then you got what you ordered. This isn't an iPhone.

As someone who has been coaching sports for most of my life I could not disagree with this more if I consciously tried. I spend way too much time trying to decontaminate kids of the bad habits they see baseball players exhibit on TV. Kids who won't catch a ball with two hands, who won't hold a bat with two hands, who won't run out a pop fly, who think running over catchers and second basement is "heads up play". Without making any statements about pinball specifically I can say with 20 years of experience that 99% of athletes need to follow the lead of the fundamentally sound rather than the elite. The elite are so talented that they often succeed despite their practices rather than because of them.

The two things are completely interrelated. That's why you get 11 year olds refusing to play with facemasks in hockey and trying to sneak onto football fields minus their leg pads.

The true IFPA A divisions players can do their thing because they have the decades of play behind them and the talent to do it. The rest of us need to play fundamentally sound pinball and part of that is having the rubbers as consistent as possible between home and competition. We just won't have the ability to adjust instinct in 15 minutes of practice time.