And the reality is you have a bigger chance of losing a grand or more on an LE machine if you look at the past. I know 10X more people that lost their ass on X-men, Hulk, and Transformers than ever made a dime on BIBLE or TRON LE.

Really the only way to be safe it to sell early during the initial hype and when they first start delivering.

I am curious why Stern has yet to release any further information/pics of the LE/Premium ("Fuel bar", laser cut speaker panels, vid of the hammer/casket loading, etc) and these games are supposed to be shipping in a few weeks?

You can guarantee that Stern is carefully releasing information to keep hype up, and right now they are not about showing what the all have at the moment and more about keeping the mystery there to keep people guessing and buying. If they believed they had a good quality product that everyone will want, they would just keep the info coming.. but that's not the case. Stern's policy of over-promising and under-delivering while fattening Gary's wallet by cutting corners is still in place. Don't kid yourself. Now that they know people are going to pay ridiculous money and all the LE's are sold out, there's no benefit to show us what we are supposed to get on the LE/Premium. Hell, now they can cut a $50 part out of the game and it won't matter, right? $50 X 400 = $25K in Gary's pocket, and it's a sellout w/o anyone knowing. Hell, they may have had a really cool thing planned for the FUEL bar and decided to pull it now for a higher profit margin. We'll never know, right?

I do disagree that it's the distributors pumping things up, it's the people/speculators here that are buying multiple machines to re-sell that are the problem. Not that I personally care, but I do believe that's the problem. And of course those that are willing to pay the ridiculous prices.