Hi Hippynerd,
I understand your desire for taking risks and having fun but I dont understand why you try to avoid to acknowledge fundamentals of physics or biology, atleast it seems to me this way.
The more you increase sheer stress on bacterial cellmembranes the probability for cracking their membrane increases. The more you poison someone with alcohol you increase the likelyhood of lethality. Of course there is always someone who withstands this pressure, if this was a common event natural selection comes into play.
All you are doing is gambling about probability, if it works its fun times, if it fails its "putting something into the garbage" times. Id rather not recommend someone to drastically increase chances to put something into the garbage, just because of 30cents or whatsoever.
The good part about maximum ratings is that you dont have to let build someone 1000 pieces of something as developers already did that for you and tell you at this point it might fail, it might not but chances drastically increase. I dont like to gamble to loose 50$ because of saved 30cents, you might, thats up to you.