Well, buckle up kiddos, cause here's the current dealio: I was gonna wait to get further into the process of solving this issue before I even let people know, but I figure I might as well share the current subject of my ire for the sake of clarity and hopefully some understanding. I've got the PCBs on hand and I've been working on going through them between getting Phantom orders shipped, sorting and assembling the stabs for the kits, and dealing with various other things that are all just kicking me in the balls at the same time. As it currently sits, I've made my way through approximately 103 of the PCBs, mostly purple, and this following album is the pictures I've taken of approximately 63 of those PCBs I've looked through:
https://imgur.com/a/XLfP8UlFull text condensed below for space.
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As you can imagine, I'm absolutely ****ing pissed at what I've seen so far, especially the sheer incidence rate of the issues found. When I first dug into the boxes I thought that the packaging was actually pretty good, bundles of 10 PCBs in pairs with plenty of bubble wrap. What I didn't know right then was how putting them in pairs instead of separately in the wrap leads to the throughhole pins on the USB Mini connector to be able to scrape the everloving **** out of the adjacent board, leading to the main issues, though some of the scratches and residue looks like it's an artifact of the manufacturing of the PCB and should have been found before they even left the PCB fab. If whoever packed the boards hadn't been so intent on saving $.20 of bubblewrap per bundle I'm fairly confident that a fair bit of the issues shown in that album would not have been present and many of the boards pictured there would have needed minor cleaning at the most; the fact that all but a couple of the boards have no visual flaws on the back of the PCB reinforce this thought.
Like I mentioned, I'm pretty ****ing upset that this happened, so much that I've pretty much been just in a state between angry and disgust at the problem since I found out about it and been in a **** mood this whole week as a result. I'm planning to look through more of the bundles of PCBs over the weekend between more Phantom orders and working on stabs and see if the trend continues, which at this point it seems quite likely it will. The plan after that is to send a carefully thought out email to the seller explaining the situation in detail, including that album and further pictures that I take, and as tactfully as possible tell them that this is absolutely unacceptable and they need to do something about it. I'm not confident that much might be done, but I am pretty confident in the power of a very large PayPal dispute pointed their direction as a good motivator, if the need arises.
Also due to this, I'm planning on taking a close look at all of the plates over the next week to make sure that they're going to be fine. I've left most of them in their original packaging(keep the dust and cats off of them) after inspecting a small number of each color, but this whole deal has left me nervous about potential issues with any of the components involved and I want to catch anything as soon as possible at this point.
If would oblige me, feedback concerning this situation would be much appreciated since right now I'm still just overwhelmed with being upset about this and could really use some outside thoughts on this. Someone in the discord thought that maybe I was overreacting to some of the issues, particularly concerning the price point I was able to get the PCBs for, and who knows maybe I am. I was pretty much expecting a perfect product to show up and maybe that was too much of me to expect. So far all of the PCBs that I've plugged in to test have taken the firmware update, had their LEDs working, and had random selections of keypresses work just fine as well, aside from one board with a crushed USB connector that I didn't bother to mess with yet, and only one or two have had anything wrong with the back side of the board, all the visual issues have been on the front of the board only for the very vast majority I've seen.
Please bear with me while I deal with this the best I can, I'm doing my best to make sure everyone receives the product that they deserve and I'm hoping everyone can understand that.