The conspiracy theories are unbelievable, Linn did this, Linn did that, all to make their customers spend more! If you want to improve the mating between the bearing housing and subchassis the odds are you're going to adapt both pieces to achieve that. Back in the day I seem to remember the Cirkus was a few hundred pounds at most and for years a subchassis was what, about thirty quid? Both were so insignificantly cheap in the scale of things I had the shop 'just put them on' when the deck was in getting an Ekos fitted. Mind you the combined result was a bit better than expected. When I came to collect the deck the shop staff were all crammed in the listening room trying it out.
Linn customers generally don't need to be cajoled or tricked out of their cash, back then I would just have bought more and bigger amplifiers with any spare cash (in fact I pretty well did), the price of the bearing was frankly peanuts. I don't regard the price of the new bearing as out of the way either. Even though the deck is better just now than I've ever heard it (perhaps due to more regular use of the whole system while working at home) the prospect of further musical revelation beckons and I've saved far more on petrol (actually LPG in my case) over the past few months not to mention a missed holiday abroad. I can be confident in it's longevity as the current item must be well over 25 (or whenever they first came out) and still sounds sooo good. In fact I've never had a piece of Linn equipment fail in over 34 years and that includes a bargain 5103 I bought on Pink Fish for two hundred quid just to fill in a second system for a couple of months and that was three or four years ago.