It's a culture issue when such cases don't get caught in testing and support staff either doesn't know about it (=the scripts are bad), doesn't get told that there is a workaround (because clearly there is), or (the worst of the possible options) gets told to act like everything is fine.
It's a race condition which involves physical interaction with the product, which only occurs during a very rare operation, which looks pretty much identical to a genuine hardware defect.
This isn't something you can just trivially unit test. If you don't see this happen multiple times during initial hardware development, you are never catching it. A single failure of a prototype can easily be attributed to a manufacturing defect - especially if it was hand-soldered.
Once it's in the field replacing the 0.01% of units suffering from random issues under warranty is far cheaper than having an engineer spend weeks trying to diagnose every single weird failure mode. Unless it affects a number of units, it's just not worth the money. You have to consider that support doesn't get a "the LEDs stopped working when I unplugged the device immediately after flashing it" message, they just get "the LEDs don't work". Support scripts are made for horses, not zebras.
> Once it's in the field replacing the 0.01% of units suffering from random issues under warranty is far cheaper than having an engineer spend weeks trying to diagnose every single weird failure mode. Unless it affects a number of units, it's just not worth the money.
It does affect a number of units, that's the point, and it's serious enough that the brand image is suffering. Just google "elgato unreliable" - tons of results, and when the top result is a Reddit post in the official Elgato subreddit of all places literally titled "My elgato experience has left me with nothing but hate in my heart", all alarm sirens should go fucking off.
To top it off, Elgato used to be a German brand right out of Munich [1]. German products used to be noteworthy for top-notch engineering and reliability...
