Well I am sure everyone has prefferences and in my case I chose not to take chance and brake or missaling gears in loading mech. As complicated as this may sound it is actually quite simple and easy not to mention faster than manually moving the gears.

And yes I have tried pressing eject rapidly during and just after the power up and did not come out. As laser assy was unable to establish proper focus lock cpu would not enable eject drive circuit at all. In case like this you can push eject button until you are blue in the face and it will not work because cpu is going to ignore it. I had bad disc inside unit that expects a boot loader from it--not a happy combination... This could all be avoided if the Philips designers incuded focus-read aqusition time-out without power-down and maybe even auto-eject on read error...