I've read a fair bit (admittedly not all) but haven't seen a reference to what is a common problem, and a construction trap that is all too easy to fall into.
It doesn't just apply to boats either.
You can have what can possibly be called a failure due to a catastrophic cascade effect of slightly unsuitable tolerances.
Penny pinching is one of the main causes of this, along with inadequate oversight and supervision (the
concept of competent
work supervision has itself largely disappeared over the past 40 years).
A system is built with a lot of components with different tolerances. When specifications allow penny pinching to focus on the minus end of the +/- allowable, you can end up with everything being a) in tolerance individually, but b) badly out of tolerance as a whole.
I am not saying this is what has happened with
Oyster, but I can say that far too much of this has been going on, for way too long in pretty much every field, and it is a problem that is not getting any better.
Now you add in penny pinching with individual component suppliers, where the component is also made up of several or many items with +/- tolerances . . . .
Often a manufacturer is blamed for inadequate product. But they do supply according to
price. If you need a 20p item to reliably do the job, but are only prepared to pay 10p.
You get a 10p item.
As an ex importer/exporter, I have seen this process in action in real life, way too often.
It's how my father ended up
buying a blender off Tesco's, that wasn't particularly
cheap, but when he used it on his kitchen worktop, it burst into flames. A CE label isn't worth the letters that are printed on it.
When he took it back to Tesco's, to the branch he bought it from, the large pile of blenders they had
for sale there previously, had disappeared, and they denied point blank that they had ever had any in the store to sell him (the receipt was worthless, because all the printing had faded to nothing within a few weeks of
buying the thing).
I tried to get him to take it to Trading Standards, but he thought that would be a waste of time, because it was 'Tesco's'.
Now if you think this sort of corruption isn't afflicting boat building (or pretty much everything surrounding chronically overpriced products with the
boating industry, among so many others), I have some great beachfront property in the Sahara to sell you.
How is it that a significant amount of so called
marine grade calibrated chain, for instance, isn't? How come a significant amount of so called 1x19
stainless steel rigging wire, isn't? Anchors falling over and breaking in half isn't happening, is it? Etc. Etc.
If you keep playing their
game, they will cheerfully keep ripping you off with substandard chronically overpriced
gear.
The only way you win, is by refusing to play, and it is how complete industries end up committing financial suicide. The good end up being taken down by the bad, and with the bad.