Quote Originally Posted by kup View Post
The problem appears to be that they outsource manufacturing to Chinese factories and Tak-Tom (apparently since the merger) has become rather laxed about properly inspecting the QC of products coming from these factories.

I have not noticed sloppiness due to manufacturing cost cutting as its very evident with Hasbro, its more about TakTom relaxing their efforts that prevent defective products hitting the toy shelves.
I understand the point you are making but with the recently re-released MP-04; Don't know how many were made and mine was okay (not great, but it had all the parts/ no serious defects etc), but from what I read on numerous sites online etc I would hazard a guess that around half had either missing parts, non working/ broken parts or badly applied paintwork. Now this is a AUS$200/$180(1st sale)/$170(the other sale I remember) toy.

Thundercracker... I don't own it, some site told me that it was around US$50 retail... I'd say that between 90 and 100% contained at least one major defect.

Now we aren't talking about a lack of qc. We are talking about no qc whatsoever... no-one is checking the final product. Well, either that or, they think that they can get away with shipping broken/ not working or defective toys. Because the collectors market, in general, is so scared of missing out on anything.