I know it's not the popular opinion, but I think SS and all the other retailers handled this scratch situation the best they could for a very large and logistically expensive and difficult to ship product that they did not make.
Yes, it would have been great if Hot Toys was more communicative about the scratch problem and had a plan in place to accept returns and exchanges on such a large item in case of defects, but that probably would have been way too expensive for them...and that expense would be passed on to the consumer, increasing the MSRP of the Batmobile quite a bit. The way I see it, having a ready-to-go system in place not just for shipping these huge collectibles around the world, but also for accepting a large number of them back (shipping paid by HT, not the consumer of course) and then shipping replacements (again shipping paid by HT) would have been crazy expensive.
Should Hot Toys have for that before they decided to make a 1/6 scale Batmobile? Maybe they did...and they realized that to be able to pay for that, that 1/6 scale plastic Batmobile would cost around $1000. It's probably more than the market could bear and they'd take a long time to sell out and HT to recoup the production costs and make a profit. Obviously HT took the gamble that there wouldn't be any widespread issues, and they were wrong.
That said, besides their lack of communication with the customers and failure to explicitly admit there was a problem, I think these new batches show real effort by Hot Toys to take immediate action to prevent a bad issue from continuing as soon as they found out about it. The first reports of scratched and scuffed Batmobiles started when the first SS batch started getting distributed in the US a little more than a month ago, right? Supposing Hot Toys took corrective action to protect future batches right away by adding the plastic bag or foam sheet between the car and the shield that we're now seeing....after a 2-3 week ship ride across the Pacific, and clearing customs, and then being distributed by SS....when would we expect the extra-protection Batmobiles to start showing up in customers' hands? Right about now.