Gonna a make a sandwich. Later.
Again, why Zen, instead of any of the numerous other companies out there with bigger budgets and teams? What makes you think Zen has any better chance of timely publishing and/or acquiring table licenses than anyone else? Just because they make... fantasy pinball tables? I'm not seeing the link between Zen's fantasy pinball work and easy real-world table license acquisition, or why they'd have any better luck with publishing than an even larger company. Not to bash your dream world, I'm just not understanding where you're coming from. Zen Studios makes video games, straight-up, like any other video game developer. FarSight puts together a simulation product implemented with real-world parts. They're two completely different things.
Another thing is, I don't know why people keep putting Zen on a pedestal like they've always got their stuff together. They've had their own problems too. Tables not importing properly, trophies not unlocking (multiple times), and recently, the new Doctor Strange table was not registering properly with PS3 players (like me) and we had to download an unlock key from a previously purchased table (strangely) in order to get the game to recognize Doctor Strange as a full table and not just a demo. And it wasn't showing up in the store for PS4 players, but I guess that could be Sony's fault. Zen's tables also have many glitches too, just like FarSight's. I've run into a lot of them myself. They're not perfect.
The polish that people see in Zen's work is clearly coming from the fact that Zen has a really talented team... they are supremely artistic. Really impressive artistic vision, indeed. Of course, this passes through to every aspect of the game, including the presentation from the very beginning in their boot-up screen and in the table select menu as well. But it doesn't mean that FarSight's game is not polished. Their various menus and leaderboards may not be very polished, but the tables certainly are, to me anyway. I feel like they play very well, and I'm still impressed by the level of realism they've been able to achieve. But they're a different group of guys with a different vision of how things should be presented. I don't think anyone would have a problem with that scrolling table menu if it was really sharp looking, and if it doesn't get too long (may have to replace it with a Zen-style menu when the collection reaches 50 or so...), and maybe they know that the thing that matters the most is the meat and bones of the product, and that's the tables themselves, which do, for the most part, look and play very well. So maybe that's why they don't put too much effort into the main menu, or the generic sounding music that plays in the background. Maybe they feel that those things don't really matter in the end, and you know what? They don't. I wouldn't mind if those things were upgraded, sure, but I also wouldn't ever feel bothered if they weren't. As long as high-quality tables keep coming, FarSight will stay in my good graces.
Am I rambling? Probably. I get like this when I'm hungry.
Because Zen's publisher is Microsoft?
Then why wouldn't FarSight just strike a deal with Microsoft themselves instead of using Zen as a middleman?
