ZoranC,
I am not the one to usually get in the way of a good rant, however, as someone who designs machine learning algorithms, where statistics is a necessary evil, I must point out that the sample set of 5 that you talk of is extremely skewed. It is well known most of online responses are when the user has found a problem. Very few of those who buy and are happy will post online, most of them will be quietly happy with their purchase. The sample set ends up being the 5 people who respond online (most of them are the ones who detect a problem). Additionally the users here also have their tolerances close to or tighter than the manufacturers tolerance.
That being said, I dont think any camera company is worse than Canon when it comes to manufacturing, having had to buy 4 lenses before 1 usable was found from a sample set of 1
Cheers,
N