Has the Customers' Perception of Quality Changed?

It could be that the cost in time and effort to ensure consistent quality is higher than the cost of good customer service and replacement parts. Even if customer service might technically take more time, the time is spent by different people.

I used to be an audio-visual technician, and there was one instructor who despised my department because she didn't like any of the equipment in her classroom. The system was old and had weird, intermittent bugs. We all knew how to make the problems temporarily go away, but we never figured out how to stop them from coming back. All of the other technicians avoided working on the room and spent their time on more straightforward problems. I, on the other hand, spent months testing every part of the system, keeping the instructor updated on my tests. I did not manage to fix a single thing in that room, but the instructor was very happy with my customer service and told my boss as much. The impression that I cared and was trying was apparently worth enough to outweigh the fact that I had done absolutely nothing useful.

My boss told me that I can't fix every problem, that intermittent problems are almost impossible to troubleshoot, and that I should spend more of my time on problems that are easier to resolve. We would continue to get critical calls for that room and would continue to apply temporary fixes, because that was less time-consuming than identifying the source of the issue.

On the installation side, I have tried to convince people of the merits of doing things right the first time, but I think short-term stressors interfere with that idea. Increasing complexity and rapidity of development probably has something to do with it, like how Agile programmers will release software with known bugs that they intend to repair in a later update, just so they can get something out. There seems to be an idea that getting everything right is impossible, so if you try to get it right the first time you will never finish a product, or you will finish it so slowly that it will be obsolete by the time it is done.