My SuperDrive no longer accepts media. Options short of replacement?

My 2.0 GHz Aluminum Macbook's SATA SuperDrive (HLDT GS21N) no longer accepts media - recorded CD/DVD or blank CD/DVD. I can hear the spin-up sound when the machine boots, but it feels as if something's blocking the disks about 2cm from the right side as I try to insert them. The drive makes no attempt to grab the disk, and I can't hear any mechanical sounds from the drive, other than the spin-up at boot.

I've pulled the drive and opened it up per the iFixit manuals (A1278 Optical Drive Replacement; Optical Drive Disc Removal), and I can't find anything obviously wrong. There's no foreign objects in the drive. I'm not sure what to check to be sure that the eject mechanism works. I didn't have any kind of adapter to convert the drive for use with external SATA enclosure, so I couldn't test it to see if it was a power issue.

All software on the internal drive reports the drive as present, presumably functional: System Profiler, Disk Utility, Toast 11. The OS is 10.6.8.

Are there any repair options left, or should I just replace it? Thanks!