In industry these days, companies don't staff up to meet new contract awards, they use existing staff to fulfill and then staff up utilizing the profits from the "done deals". Kimber has recently won some substantial contracts to supply arms to some LEO agencies, ergo their staff has been focused predominantly on providing extra TLC for those pistols shipped to the contract. This creates a cycle in which the end consumer, for the duration of contract fulfillment, is getting short shrift in both product quality and service responsiveness. Now that Kimber has grown, then can financially weather these "bumps in the road" with little impact to their bottom line. Once their growth model levels out, they will pay more attention to the civvie market, but for now are relying on their customer service department to effectively stall until they can afford to staff up once the contracts are paid and wait for the next contract.
It's an ugly cycle, but one very prevalent in modern industry. Oh and one clarification to my earlier statement regarding the staffing up. There are, in any industry, skilled and unskilled labor. It's easy to staff up unskilled labor (shipping clerks, order fulfillment, etc.) and difficult, especially in the firearms industry, to staff up skilled labor (gunsmiths). In the latter, most are probably going to have to be trained or apprenticed to existing staff, increasing the burden on them, and diminishing their time available to do a proper job on mass market product. Once modest training is done, these new smiths are probably those who are providing fulfillment of mass market hardware while the skilled gunsmiths are focusing most of their efforts on contract hardware.
In essence, the QA problems you're seeing are indicative of a growing company in a highly competitive market. It's hugely unfair to the end consumer of the mass market product, but a viable business model for protecting profit margins. Just ask Microsoft.
