Geez. I'd hate to see what your wife looks like.
He posted a pic. She looks like a surprised person with a giant butt.
Jeez. You know I'm not married. And I live with myself.
Are you sure that restrictor is not a consumable item? Cause, then, it wouldn't be broken... 
.....ohhh. Right. I think I get that.
Turnarcades: I don't I tighted it down that hard. Not a big deal anyways.
Well, during my exploration, I thought maybe I'd tried this before. I dunno. But what I found out was that the higher you set the custom restictor value, the greater the, like, dead space is. Seemed that way, anyways, as I started at 20, went to 40, and then 60 and it seemed to get worse.
So I looked back at the default 'custom' value, which is 9. Hmmm. So I set mine for 4. Oh. Just about perfect for 4-way and diagonal games. 8-way games are still not quite right.
Here are the details:
diagonal games:
With mame32 .104, I was quite easily just sliding the shaft (hey, hey, don't go there!) around the curve of the restrictor on both games. This is how I wanted it when I had that restrictor made. And no problems with the inherent 'play' in the shaft.
With MameUI (.13 something, but I'm guessing anything since the controls re-write), it wasn't as smooth. I tried setting Ultramap to 'analog' and letting mame pick from its maps, but that was worse.
On both, the 45-degree only diagonals was less responsive than the 4-way, 45-degree, with the same respective less-ness of quality.
4-way games: in both versions of MAME, there seems to be a little bit of dead space between directions, meaning I had to really make sure I was going whatever way. I've always preferred the 4-way UD bias anyways, and it saved the day, here. Very nice.
8-way games required using the 8-way easy diagonals, and then shaft play was coming into effect, requiring editing the map. First it was low-right. Fixed that. Then low-left had the same problem. Fixed that. Now the issue was that since the feel was so little regarding how far the stick moved, now, it felt like a bunch of lag because there was a sizeable gap between up and down: the 'center' in the map, plus the 'dead space' of the stick play. MMMMM.
But for the important games this seems to be working killer, so maybe I won't get mad at it. (Just dash my dreams of phasing out my P360s for these! Actually for 4-way games it being centered seems better than how far away the P1 stick is to left on my panel, so whatever.)
So. Those of you who are thinking of having/making tighter restrictors might wanna check this out. Materially, all ya need is some acrylic or plexi (this one's acrylic), a saw, and a hole saw.