Be careful not to conflate the issues of one model/year with another. They could conceivably be the same but a manufacturer won't necessarily see it that way. So if a 2005 product has a particular kind of failure occuring in big numbers, and they see a smattering of it on a 2006 equivalent it does not mean they will take the same approach to the 2006 failures, epecially if the particular part involved was reved or sourced from a different board maker.
Companies come up with wellness strategies when they uderstand their exposure. If people paid $5K for a set in 2005 and $1800 dollars for a similar product made in 2007, the manufacturer is likely to be much more generous with the folks who spent a bunch of money.
The reason I can talk like an expert about these kind of things is that I authored things like service bulletins at times and daily reviewed onea that were in process as part of the America team that made sure they were accurate. Some were for internal audiences only and others were for external audiences. Companies when they have a major problem always stall while they go through the deliberative process internally to understand their exposure. Exposure is the critical word. Does it involve just a few units, if so it is easy to replace units and make customers happy.
If it involves a thousand or ten thousand they are only going to do something like offer replacements or buybacks if they are backed in to a corner... But if the instances are sporadic and they don't have major clusters of failures many times they will often take a hard position on out of warranty product.
Even the same company will be different from month to month, issue to issue depending on financial pressures, what the press is saying, what legal is advising how many dollars they can get back from their vendors. You just can never really know what they will do, even if you are on the inside. I have had people work for me who had to deliver very carefully scripted response that service management and legal went over with a fine tooth comb. Can you imagine when you know for 6 months that xxx seagate or western digital or brand of the week is eating customer data and nobody knows how to fix it because the drive maker has not determined root cause yet and all the drives on the planet are bad. I have seen all that crap multiple times over. Bad caps, good lord, that is the bane of electronics industry. Dell is just now taking the write offs for over a billion dollars due to bad capicitors. I remember HP managed it better but we stonewalled the issue for months and months, changeing system boards out by the hundred for strategic customers knowing the new ones were likely to fail soon. I think it could HP several hundred million dollars. It was a nightmare that never seemed to end from the inside.
There were times we did would not acknowledge a problem we were seeing everyday and no amount of pressure would get a customer resolution. Then suddenly we are fixing thousands of machines in the field with an open straightfoward attidue about it.
So don't think Mits is the only company in the world that will stonewall people for a long time before they decide how to react in a customer friendly way. And depending on the internal culture, they can very well tell people to pound sand. This happens everyday. I recall my brother had a Dodge that had been to the dealer for major repairs dozens of times for major service under the warranty.
His wife was pregnant and he was out of town so I went with her to meet the zone manger. The car was still in warranty but about to run out. Here she was 8 monts pregnant and they had towed the care three times in two weeks leaving her pregnant and stranded on the highway in Houston's high summer. Did they do something about fixing the car? No they told her to pound sand. Actually they said "you know what? You should tade the car off". That was it, unless she was going to court, they did not give a damn. And even if you did go to court, they have an app for that.
She traded the car in that day and got no special consideration. It was the right thing to do under the circumstances. So sometimes it is best to just cut your losses and move on.
