FYI, all these high score games seem to have this delay before your score shows up on the leaderboards issue. Not just PA. Don't panic if your score doesn't show up right away.
Ah but it didn't save locally either. I would've been fine with it not registering online if I could've just snapped a picture of local scores to show for the competition, but when both options seemed borked that's what really got me stomping. Glad it worked its way to the leaderboard though!
Also, to bookend your thoughtful TPA rebuttal, setting aside any consideration of bugs or UI or whatnot, my beef with TPA has never been about authenticity. You, Zimm, Peta, etc. are waaay more qualified to judge how realistic the virtual tables are compared to their real-world counterparts, as I've only ever played a handful of actual tables with any regularity (esp. Jurassic Park, my pinball true love).
No my chief beef is just with the soul-crushingly unfair difficulty of the vast majority of the tables, which I attribute to the gripes I listed before; gobbly outlanes, huge center flippers gap, lack of bang back, etc. If TPA's tables are even easier than the real ones that's even more mind-boggling to me. Why shut out like 90% of your player base from being able to do most of/everything on a given table?
You'd be well within your rights to simply say "Git gud noob!" and lord knows I've tried over the last few years. But that's where the contrast with Zen comes into play: Zen's tables are way more generous with outlane saves, ball savers, bang backs, easier flipper pass, and even then their tables are still
really tough. But they feel like a fair tough to me, whereas TPA's game overs often feel largely out of my hands.
As I've said before, I'm really glad that both companies exist and have a different approach to things. Diversity is always good. I just wish that 1) FarSight would clean up their engine significantly and 2) that sitting down to play TPA didn't so often feel like sitting down to play 40+ different pinball equivalents of Vanquish Challenge 6.