The resources required to create super high quality animations on modern displays are far beyond what it's worth considering most of the time you won't even be looking at the display. Stern certainly could spend more resources on creating higher quality animations, but I don't think that would translate into better sales or even a more popular game. The most important part of a display IMHO is simply that it conveys information cleanly and clearly. I don't care if the animations are basic if I'm able to get the info I need from a quick glance.

For this reason, I honestly would not mind at all if a new game were ever to release with a DMD. Good dots look really nice and require far fewer resources than modern displays. I think we can all agree that some nice DMD animations on Houdini and Octoberfest would have been much better than what we ended up with, but the question is if a DMD would have been able to convey enough info.

Man this got way off topic. Someone made a point about how modern displays haven't really been utilized in major new ways that offer features that would have been impossible on DMDs (Game changing features, not just stuff like being able to play movie clips in HD instead of via dots) and it turned into yet another argument about whether or not leaderboards should be added to pins.

I'm trying to think, what *are* some truly innovative things that could potentially be done only with modern displays (In the back box)? Really the only thing I can think of that's actually been done is the (Partial) elimination of instant info. There's got to be some new and interesting ideas that are at least worth trying though.