@Pitts: if all you are interested in is providing a wind-up it might be best to avoid hitting the "post" button. (I have more frequently of late overcome the urge to post, which I find is a healthy thing).
It is troubling to me, the idea that of two suppliers for a precision component in a drive train/transmission, one had 3x failure rate (or significantly less reliability) and yet was still retained as a supplier/vendor by the manufacturer. While there may be more to that story, on the face of it someone didn't take reliability as seriously as they ought to have done, or, a batch/lot of material of considerable size was produced and distributed and it took a long time for people to discover and try to remedy that.