Interesting point neelie. I read somewhere recently that a pile of cruisers (20 odd from memory, it was quite a few) had to get all their rafts serviced at about the same time. They decided to pop them all for some practice so chucked them in and pulled the string.
The spooky part was something like 30% failed to inflate. Another pile failed to fully inflate and some inflated but leaked excessively. There was only something like 25% that did actually work as expected. NOTE: I don't fully remember the numbers but do remember the ones that work correctly were the minority and it was somewhat spooky. I'll see if I can find where I read it.
I've popped 5 now, none in vengeance, and all worked fine. One was 6 years past due service date. I banged off a 24man Navy one 2 years ago, that was fun and very very loud. Spend 3 hours (and quite a few beers) floating up Auckland Harbour in it and only one boat came along side to see if we were OK. Many waved as they went passed though
We found that somewhat sad.