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I read that some audiophile duplicating companies used the expensive 215's for making their real time cassette copies, partly due to the decks' long term reliability, but I'd wager that over time they had to replace and align a lot of worn record/play heads!

A feature not always appreciated about the Nakamichi head lifter design is that it gets the maximum life of the record and play heads. Pressure pads usually make a real mess of the head's face. On the other hand, Nak decks could be fussy and difficult to repair and some models used cheap plastic parts which could fail.

My ideal cassette deck might be a 215 - or a number of other good dual capstan cassette decks - but redesigned with a Nakamichi type pressure pad lifter. Maybe as Ted says what prevented other companies from incorporating a pad lifter on their high end decks was Nakamichi's patent.