Rick stated it a while back and was in regards to corrosion not mis-care damage, but maybe with advice and a expert looking at them they acted proactively to go for the refurbished avenue which is a good thing.

There were other types of tooling like dies and other obsolete junk that would never be run that were rubbish.  As for the injection and thermoforming stuff nothing was tossed.  Not to say there may be some that get scrapped in the future just because they are never going to get run again as the part is obsolete or just not worth making and the metal is worth more than the tool.

As for the history of the Williams tooling, some of it was scrapped by a company BEFORE Illinois Pinball took it over.  IIRC the company was Mercury Plastics.  They got scrapped because the company went out of business and the tooling got scrapped before anyone knew it was still there.