Even if you played for 25 years, you are not going to realize the full return of a game.
Back to the minimum bet thing... I went to pickup some free play after breakfast today and went to some different machines...
The $0.25 with a $0.50 minimum bet was a TDB Progressive. Right behind that was a gameking that did not have a progressive but required a $0.75 minimum bet on $0.25 and the $0.50 denom had a minimum bet of $1.00. The $1 and larger denom did not require a minimum bed. I did not try to play less than max bet on these games...
I guess there are people out there grinding single credits :-/