gwag02...
how can this happen? Lots of ways. It's a basic fact of a development and manufacturing environment, that no matter how hard you try, and especially when you don't try very hard, there will always be issues with anything that has recently gone into production. "Unintended/unanticipated consequences" of any change are always lurking and ready to bit. To me it's a fundamental aspect of anything recently released to production... and all we can hope as consumers is the the engineers and management involved in that product care a lot to minimize as best as possible those issues.
Throw in some turn-over in the engineering group, such that the fellow who has all the experience is gone and the new guy is doing the design... and no matter how many benefits and improvement the new guy can bring with fresh ideas, he just doesn't have the history to see more of the likely problems than the original guy.
More testing may have found the issue, but it could be a manufacturing process of a part that is inconsistent so the first parts of the press would have never displayed the defect with any amount of testing... it's when the materials go into full production then you get some new variation and voila!... you've got problems. ... and the more features, the more to go wrong. Teams with fresh ideas AND experience always get it done best...
For some perspective, in the "Legend keeps on driving" book... i think they said that since introduction in '79 they have been making consistent changes (however small) to the trucks to address this or that issue. Where i work, we have a device that's been in production since 1999 now, and it wasn't until maybe 2002 until we basically stopped having to make any changes for cost and reliablity issues, and it only has maybe 15-20 parts... and it's single use and disposable... only has to work once.
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