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Agreed. The sad reality is that unless Stern changes their tune on backstock inventory to support prior customer purchases, I suspect part out threads will become commonplace unless non-functional pins become modern art decor. $9500 for a NIB premium with only a 60-day warranty with no guarantee of part availability beyond that is a high-dollar gamble for the risk/reward especially seeing multiple threads where Stern has demonstrated that they could care less about supporting previous customers.

So, is it fair to say that there are no known out of service bricked Spike2 games due to part availability? Unless I missed it, I didn't see anyone with a Spike2 posting that their machine was down. I was nervous about purchasing a newer unit and experiencing a node board failure and then not being able to get parts. Board failures don't bother me, parts not being available does. Based on this thread, maybe my concerns were unfounded.

All the reasons you stated is why I bought SAM systems. I believe I read in one of the threads that the node boards are also encrypted. If that is indeed true, that would exclude all 3rd party suppliers unless Stern provides the keys or the encryption is defeated. Personally, I don't think there would be enough market to attempt to reverse engineer those node boards so if Stern doesn't stock them they will be unobtanium outside of repair which will be hit or miss being SMT.

With that said, I have found it frustrating that most of the better SAM games are costing more than a a number of Premium Spike2 games that have higher ratings. I suppose that may be a primary driver of the price - people like myself worried about Spike parts availability. Sometimes I feel like just taking the gamble and enjoying all the glitz and fanfare, but then my inner mechanic self and posts like yours bring me back to reality. It really is a gamble even with SAM, but SAM seems to be the safer bet for sure.