Very good post Marci and as an engineer, much of what you suggest scare's the hell out of me
On the other hand, as a customer service rep, I must agree with many of your comments. I do however disagree with your summary, also using the 750 as example.
If one where to read this board, thanks in large part to slam campaign by we all know who, the 750 would be assumed to have low sales. In fact AVT was never able to meet demand, and even now sales still exceed several thousand pieces per month. We no longer sell the unit to the general public for many of the reason you suggest, well our industrial customers are very happy and our market for the product continues to grow, thanks more too personal experience then forum comments.
Hopefully there is simple answers that will allow manufactures to protect themselves from RMA's do to abuse and modifications. It would be nice if Laing could just add a seal to prevent disassembly, but then the issue of how to clean results?
In the long term I believe these issues will soon go away, given the products I seen developed at AVT, C-Systems and have read about from other companies.
The trend is clearly for very long term fully sealed systems in which any modification will clearly be noticed. I believe this type of OEM application is what the DDC was developed for?
Dan is always lecturing me about the difference between an OEM, and a general retail product. Marci's post clearly indicates the real engineering concern differences between them are.
**I forgot why I came in here. The C-Systems retail pages should be back up this weekend. They are still working on the new site so there maybe daily changes.
Sorry for any problems that resulted from my bad WEB work.