This is an odd hill to die on. I'd wager that just about the majority of the memberbase here has thousands invested into their equipment, as the norm. It costs a lot more to gain a new customer than to keep a loyal one, and those who have already spent thousands with a brand, are typically quite brand-loyal. Guys argue to death over their preferred brand of action, barrel, scope, etc in here daily. Its literally why successful brands are distinct in their ability to understand the "lifetime" value of a customer.
You may personally own "a mix of things", but a lot of other people are repeat buyers of a brand, and its not a reach to say that the MDT black friday sale is likely marketed primarily towards existing customers.
I say that as someone who's owned multiple MDT chassis systems at this point. I also was someone who repeatedly defended them in their facebook group, and asked for people to be patient with the shipping issues, in exchange for the discounts from last year's sale.
When the average competitive chassis or higher end composite offering is north of $1,000 now, its not entitlement for their repeat customers to look forward to one singular sale.
Their customer service, like any other brand, is a mix of good and bad. Ive had both experiences, for example, I read one of their employees post on here that at some point in time, all of the skeleton stocks, would ship by default, in a newer "short" configuration, to ready the setup for their new folding stock adapter, because the current/long configuration, when adding their folding stock adapter, would result in an abnormally long minimum LOP.
I was excited because after that, I bought a full chassis kit, and to my surprise, got the older/long skeleton stock with it. Unbeknowst to me, I got old stock. When I contacted them, they said they couldnt do anything about full chassis kits purchased, despite the fact that the stock is packaged entirely separate of the core, with its own part number, its own box, and labels and all, uninstalled, and could easily have been exchanged. So I ended up selling the long stock, at a loss, just to spend my money with them again, to buy the shorter stock that I should have recieved in the first place, and also bought the folding stock adapter.
Not long after that, another chassis I purchased, once again, came as old stock, with an outdated design. They seem to have a habit of updating product and not officially announcing revisions that they don't consider important enough to communicate.
In both cases, the stocks came from two separate vendors (because the MDT website has historically been chronically back-ordered or OOS on just about everything), yet I received new old stock. I remember the same thing happening with other parts too (magazines), when having to order some of their items through a distributor specifically.
I would also wager that quite a few people wont be quick to forget this year's issue, with over an hour of their time wasted. At the time, I was comparing a composite stock to another brand, and figured I'd wait to see what MDT has on sale, because their stock is $400 more expensive than the other brand I was looking at, with zero added features to warrant the higher price. I figured if it was similar priced to the other brand, when on sale, I'd just get the MDT product, because despite the issues Ive mentioned, there's been a lot of good too.
If the solution, as mentioned by others here, is to "buy it at the normal price" to avoid dealing with an hour of mine or anyone else's time wasted or this massive website failure, then the solution may also be to just looking at another brand's product all together, one that doesnt repeatedly make empty promises to fix their website in time for a sale they target their existing customer base with.
I think of B&T, who announces their black friday sale early to their customer-base, before its on the website to begin with, as a stark contrast to this poorly executed promotion.
Stuff like this sticks with people for a long time.
