Quoted from 85Txaggie:Sam Stern had nothing to do with the SAM boardset.
True, but the Stern whitestar boardset was essentially a continuation of Sega/Data East version 1/2/3, which was a copy of B/W system 11...
Not a huge correlation, but could explain the "feel".
I personally have only warmed up to the "feel" of modern Sterns over the last couple of years. I hated the way the flippers felt, as subtle as it was, compared to wpc/sys11 games.