yeah it has its up's and downs i prefer not to use no swap style but like when my mod stoped working it came in handy till i got it fixed
and also my first mod was a apple and it got were it would not play any the hot newer games so i had to get a new chip in a new unit and had problems ever sence my installer was not the best i had to send the unit to him 2 times aftr i got it the first time costing me shiping and time of sending it off then my disk tray comes out but wobbles real bad like he broke something on it he did this to 2 v9s i had first one died to eeprom 2nd im still useing so i know it was'nt a mistake it was like he broke it to get it solder my very first time i got the unit back the tray was not like that but the 2nd 2 times it was
so i figer if it gose out any time soon i will have to fix it my self
then the fan wire broke off first time i got the v9 back causeing it to over heat and i had a POS 25 watt iorn and a huge tip took me 2 hours to get that solder back on burned my hand no telling how many times i told the modder and he said i could had sent it back but i just got it that day from a week w/o it and relly did not want to send it off for another week so i did fix that myself
and solder jobs getting so cheap now days i dont see how its even worth doing loy dose it for $30 w/o chip so that means hes only makeing prob around $25 in cash which is'nt much for that kinda work and ur right about flip tops some of them r made cheap like the ones i have i had it to break like u said but i got it superglude back togather and it works again and the loaders and stuff is a pain but there only a few games that use them and they got a new all in one loader out now that will boot any game needing a loader with the one disk and they fixing to make it were u can use the loader from the mem card so u wont have to swap as much no more