Wow, blinking light win, nice! I'm already used to not pushing carts down, game genie being the excuse. Yeah, gotta cheat sometimes, that Konami code only gets you so far...
If you guys haven't tried it, I couldn't recommend Caig deoxit more. It's for circuit and electrical connector maintenance. I'm an electrical engineer and Caig stuff is pretty awesome. I put some on my game genie back in 04 the last time I replaced the 72-pin and never take it out, just pull carts from the game genie. Everything is quite reliable. Not top loader reliable but pretty reliable. I've had corruption pop up in kid Icarus once when I let it sit overnight to pickup the next day.
And I couldn't agree more, the design of the NES was pivotal to rebooting the gaming industry. There wouldn't be a successful top loader until the genesis years later, after the gaming industry was healthy enough to accept a console that didn't look like an "appliance"
I've used it for electronics work and the stuff works great, but it always felt like a waste to use it on huge collections just because it's not very cheap.
Fry's Electronics had a giant bottle of "PUREtronics 99.9% pure Electronics Cleaning Grade Isopropyl alcohol" (think it was over a liter) for $7.99 so I bought that several years ago and I'm only just getting low on the stuff after I've cleaned literally thousands of games in addition to cleaning PCBs and dissolving flux residues with it. For the average retro gamer I'd heartily recommend DeoxIT, but for the guy who just ordered 21(!) 1-Up cards to save on cotton swabs when cleaning his entire collection, Isopropyl will have to do!
Actually, I ordered 3 cards from the cheapest source and was about to order six more from the next cheapest place when I noticed that it only cost $3 more for 18 of them from the manufacturer. Yeah: Ended up getting a few too many.
I have premixed vials of the isopropyl alcohol with 50% distilled water that I usually use first and other vials with 99.9% for anything particularly dirty. Nintendo's own Official NES Cleaning Kit instructions say to use water first and a 50% solution with isopropyl if you still have trouble, but I suspect that they are just hesitant to recommend it outright because they contradict their own care instructions printed on nearly every game pak ("Do not clean with alcohol, benzene, or other such solvents."). That may also explain why they didn't call it alcohol in the kit's instructions (just "isopropyl").
I've heard that DeoxIT coats the electrical contacts with something that prevents/slows oxidation while not interfering with conductivity (a dielectric?) so it's far superior, but I keep everything in dust sleeves/cases and clean regularly enough that I should be able to get by without the expense.