Most 8-way sticks are fine for most games. It is just some particular games which require the older high quality sticks and simply do not play well with the shoddy modern sticks.
Case in point, robotron. My Neo Geo JAMMA cabinet has the cheapo japanese balltop sticks on it, the kind that came with it. They are fine, play everything with them. They seemed great up until the point I tried my Multi-Williams boardset in it. I scored a measly 65,000 and it felt all wrong.
Fast forward. Same MultiWilliams board, Happ bat sticks. Still felt wrong, this time I scored 150,000.
Well used (but functional) short handled Wico leaf sticks. 200,000
Spring style Wico microleafs upgraded with Heavy springs with long handled balltops (these are in my current opinion the best sticks in the world). 380,000.
Having several JAMMA cabinets makes it easy to check this sort of thing out. The reason I score the microswitch based Wico's as better than the leaf based ones is because they also have that precision required for doing fighter special moves. Leaf switch joys don't have that because all the corners generally aren't the EXACT same size on a leaf joy.