I vaguely remember something to the effect that they have a few factories producing their statues. If true, they must have to allocate projects accordingly. It would be interesting albeit purely speculative since it is all subjective to try to map the quality of production of pieces produced with output. I.e., when they are really pumping out the statues, does the quality go down? What effect if any does a project’s ES have?
If you could pay more for better quality, would you? I would not, because:
a. their prices are already on the threshold of what I personally consider a reasonable value. I know that’s subjective, plus, I do have the skills, ambition, and supplies at hand to correct minor paint flaws myself. Knowing how a lazy eye or chip in a nose or other prominent feature would bug the hell out of me, if I had to pay to fix all of these mistakes, that would considerably lower the value-$$ threshold and would probably price me out of the hobby. I am already getting to that point in fact, but I’m still a Buffy fan and will make sacrifices to keep collecting.
b. not to make it political, but I wouldn’t pay more to an American company to give more work to a Chinese factory (or, even more cynically, themselves), when there’s no guarantee that the Chinese laborer would be compensated any more than they were before (Apple, anyone?). I would, however, consider paying more if the work was done by a US worker, because I am fairly sure the US worker, even if s/he needed more initial training, would have more protections, be better compensated, and yes, produce better work as a result.
My Spike was also very well painted. Just missing a fang, so that does make the last 3 statues I’ve gotten from SS that have needed replacement. Still, the paintwork is much improved over Faith. I used to collect a LOT of SS statues. It’s only been the past few years the quality’s been hit or miss in my experience.
As for the base, it does make sense that they would need to have to replace the body too, just because there seem to be issues fitting the body to the base properly (hovering foot). The same thing happened when I had a problem with the Robocop PF base.
