I really don't understand why Stern insists on shipping their machines before the software is finished. It seems like it just hurts them in the long run.
It just gives a machine a bad first impression that then has to be slowly overcome as eventually the software improves. Sure, sometimes the machine gets enough updates to eventually be good (like supposedly TWD did - I can't say, I only played it early on), but others (like Munsters) don't.
Not only that, but often machines on location never get updated, so all the casual players ever see is the "bad" code. The BM66 that was on location near me still had the original code that it shipped with (no minor villain modes). Very annoying.
And it's not like they are saving money this way...they still have the coders spending their time on the game, they are just doing it after shipping instead of before.