Not to start up a debate, but just to throw out some points to consider when talking about business models with respect to our hobby suppliers. Not everyone who shoots or reads here has any business experience with China, or contracting out your stuff.
A F500 sized corporation, and most MidCap will have a substantial legal staff that burns at least several million per year. For that burden what they are typically doing is protecting the company's liabilities but also the Intellectual Property. That means detecting and prosecuting violations, which takes a significant amount of work, thus money. For some business endeavors, the legal departments burn in the hundreds of millions per year.
For a business to send it's Intellectual Property to China, without legal work to protect them, means in short order there will be knock-offs and counterfeits.
Unless the legal folks prosecute this, their profits will be eroded in short order too. You shouldn't be surprised at how low on the business radar these pirates will go to steal IP and copy it. We have all seen it.
So, keep in mind that a cottage industry sized company may or may not come from a larger business background, which brings the Rolodex full of connections and resources to get straight to state of the art manufacturing like ST did with their plastic parts. If you send out the designs without a full legal staff, and the pirates smell profit, god help you.
With that in mind, we can all wish that Ingenuity Precision was more dialed in and polished, but we can't make that happen with all the typing and complaining in the world. That escalation takes either signing away his designs, accepting business partners who take a profit, or slow growth.
That is what was meant many threads ago when folks warned beginners that cottage industry folks are not like dealing with Fortune 500 sized corporations. If you don't have the stomach for dealing with cottage industry folks, then you may need to look elsewhere or stock up on Tums. It can be very frustrating, and sometimes it can be rewarding too. YMMV Carry on.
