Your comment seems to indicate this person has some great "credentials" but yet he doesn't appear to have all of his facts in order. Do you agree with his statement where he said strike machine "still out on the floors as recently as last year."?

When someone is trying to persuade me on a subject and they don't have their facts correct, I tend to question the basis for their other opinions regardless of their credentials.

I would however agree that casinos live on gamblers and not collectors. Seems like common sense to me.

LE chips appear to me to be a marketing tool. Some casinos try to leverage that tool more than others. If a casino is touting themselves as having the best collectable chips and the best LE chip program, then you would expect them to be "collector" friendly.

Think of it this way... Let's say a casino offers "Shrimp Cocktails" as a marketing tool to attract traffic to their establishment. They tout themselves as having the best Shrimp Cocktails. Then at the height of their popularity, they start tinkering with their offerings and as a result they start offending the very people that their marketing program was directed toward. Seems like a marketing plan gone bad to me. Only natural that these customers would complain and eventually shop elsewhere.