The force was actually borne by the contacts? Man. You'd think they would have put the contacts on something more flexible, and transmit the force with the outer covering.
Yep. I think the idea was to make it behave like the toploading VCRs which were around at the time: insert then press down. Very often customers would refer to the cartridges as "Nintendo tapes".
Sure, the American NES was deliberately designed that way in order to not look so much like a video game device, because everybody was paranoid due to the video game crash having happened recently.
I'm really asking a mechanical question. Basically, if you're going to build an insert-and-press-down device, it would make sense to have a mechanical system to handle all of that separately from the electrical contacts. Basically, you'd have the cartridge slide into some kind of device which captures it and has the springs and latches to make the system work as desired. Within that device, you'd also have the electrical contacts with the cartridge, but set up so that the fragile electrical contacts don't actually transmit the spring's force, which goes through the outer frame instead. You made it sound like the force got transmitted directly through the electrical contacts without any separate spring-loaded device, which seems like a pretty obvious failure point.
Kinda. The point was to push the contacts into position, so some of the force landed there, but I don't think the contacts were actually the fulcrum of the lever. Look at pictures 10 and 11.
