You and me both. Since PA came out, I've come to realise I'm far more a fan of the alpha-numeric games than the DMD ones. DMD IMO relies too much on telling the story and providing a captivating gameplay experience via animations and novelties, while earlier ones had to rely solely on the playfield and sound to suck you in. If you're looking at the DMD, you're not looking at the playfield and your concentration isn't 100% where it should be. If the only info on the backglass is your score, then you rarely look at it and you're completely involved sucked in to where you should be.
It seems weird that I'd prefer something that's been featured less in PA, but man... basically all the DMD games they've included, even though they're from different designers, play EXACTLY the same. Shit, I had a post written up and ready to go on PAFans about how they had so many games designed by the same guy (CFTBL, MM, MB) until I realised they were all different. At least someone like Steve Ritchie kept the playfields (mostly) clean and flowing when DMDs came out, these other guys basically just rebadged the same game over and over again
You might be familiar with Dutch Pinball's effort to create a DMD system for Bride of Pinbot. I've had a similarly crazy idea (though probably harder to implement) that would involve retro-fying (retro-fitting?) DMD games with alpha-numeric displays and a modified ROM to pull back on some of the modes. I think it'd be awesome.