I think another important factor for the slow adoption of solid state
electronics was operators had no idea how to fix them. The technology
gap was huge between EM's and SS.

I'll chime in about the reliability of sys 1 board; my experience is they
are very reliable. However the Rockwell chips were a very poor choice
as there were many other, common microprocessor chips at the time
that were cheaper, far more available and many more development
tools available. 8080, 6502 and 6800 series to name the most common.

Interesting thread an nice to know there are so many others that
like early Gtb pins.