My bet is they buy this type of piece by the 10's of thousands. The chipping may have gone un-noticed until well into the production run(s). You can count on that they had much debate internally on how to proceed at the time.
I don't think so. That's not how you have such parts made normally. You buy/make the tooling for an injection molding 'house' to use to produce lots for say monthly needs. You don't buy, warehouse, inventory and so on when 'just in time' (or nearly so) is available in such products. The molder buys plastic as pellets in bags and makes products for many customers on very fast, very expensive machines. You have to change the tooling, that often means a ground up effort since you can't modify the existing ones (needed for production).
They sure don't stock two years of PCBs and batteries, right? Or bodies. The Cash Flow Gods don't allow that, even if engineering sense supported it. They have to pay for stuff they order.
I doubt there was much debate, really. A single meeting probably, perhaps very informal, comparing the cost of any changes against the need for those changes (pretty common thing, really). In this case the trump is they decided 'this is not a problem with the design', much like the loose stem issue. When you get right down to it it's a very very small fraction of the potential buyers who consider this, and only a small fraction of those (like all of us) who decide that while it's not exactly what we want, it is a great vape and buy anyway.
Would you like pay say $15 more for a different base that never cracked (like adding a metal plate)? I wouldn't either. And so would the 99% that don't even know.
Unfortunate, but it is what it is. Knowing the tabs cracked sometimes (I think I might even have been the first to report it about two years back when I screwed one up on one of my many teardowns) I've bought more new ones (and recommended them widely). I too wish it wasn't so, but don't look for it to change.
OF
I don't mind that then!
