I had to get over this sentiment pretty early in my collectables career, as I found out almost immediately that ‘nearly’ no statue is absolutely flawless. So while no statue is flawless I’ve had to lower my expectations to pretty good or good enough.
Of course features like light ups should work 100% of the time, and statues should go together well during assembly (but even this last one is an issue with a significant portion of my current collection), but in a hobby where things are painted by hand I’ve had to accept that said paint will almost ‘always’ have imperfections, no matter the cost (from a few hundred to a few thousand) or scale.
I first started in the Hot Toy game so after mostly transitioning from them where pieces can be nearly flawless to statues, the whiplash to my QC expectations was pretty severe.
I have a statue collection of well over a hundred pieces, from 1/6 scale all the way to 1:1 (plus another 60 or so in 1/10 scales), and I don’t think I can count on more than a handful of them where they didn’t have some sort of minor to middling QC issue. Usually paint imperfections like small scratches, chips or bleeds are quite common or some sort of fitting assembling problem. Heck even with light ups that did work (as they don’t always no matter the manufacturer) the bulk of them had some sort of light bleed issues. I think the only one that didn’t bleed was the Sideshow Mark 3 Maquette, and the Iron Studios Mark 46 was easily my worst were huge chunks of the statue acted almost like a lamp shade rather than a statue when it was lit up in a completely dark room.
