I think you have to appreciate each era and what it has to offer. Obviously from my collection you can see it is mostly EM's but I am not old enough to ever played one in the wild. As many others stated the skills used to score high on many an EM have to do with artful nudging and sheer accuracy. It is also fun to curse the scoring errors on EM's due to an over abundance of switches hit in a short period of time that most solid state machines would catch.

Late 70's pins added the solid state scoring and more complex sounds and then we have the speech and start of multilevel play fields and ramps in the 80's. All fun but it started the build up of complexity. The 90's took the show to a higher level (some argue the highest state of perfection in the Bally/Williams era) and added great ramps and stacking modes. Again a great time but a vastly different set of skill is required including memorization of modes and how to "get somewhere". I recall the first time I walked up to Attack from Mars and besides the bash toy didn't quite follow the modes at first.

I think Stern is addressing this in some ways and if you look at The King's interview on Star Trek it is almost like a multi purpose game with straightforward shoot the light shots for beginners and a ton of depth for the more experienced players. A great step in the right direction of giving many different folks both an approachable but also deep game.

Appreciate EM's for the simplicity and downright fun. It is kind of like buying an Xbox or PS4 vs. a Wii U. Sure the first 2 have vastly superior graphics and more depth in gameplay but when you want to play a few games with friends sometimes the Wii U is superior as it is simple, fun and straightforward while occasionally being brutally hard.

Enjoy them all, but if it's not your thing that is okay, more EM's for the rest of us.

Cheers!