I don't think you guys are looking at this from a corporation perspective. You want your engineers to design things that REQUIRE people to come back to you for repairs. You really think those engineers aren't doing these things on purpose.

If your repair and parts department is ~25% of your overall business, how long is an engineer going to keep their job if they are reducing a huge section of your business?

Combine that with tying to make things as small as possible to keep costs down while meeting every possible regulation for every state in the country, and you end up with your product.