[TechniSol]

Yes, that would be a terrible thing, the big bad consumers constantly reminding you that you need to get all your crap in one sock, seeing as how your company expected them to pay for the entire product, not just the parts you'd managed to get right. Much better to screw around until they get really annoyed and start voting with their wallets, in the negative. How about a new policy, when you only get 75% of your job right, you only get 75% of your pay?

Here's a wild thought, fix the darned issues -preferably before firmware releases.

If you're not being allowed to fix the issues bring the complaints to those who can make it happen and let them do their jobs and remove the roadblocks. If someone is being an obstacle find a way around or over them, even if it requires an anonymous email or snail mail or three. DO YOUR DARNED JOBS, AND QUIT MAKING EXCUSES. Roadblocks exist to be socially engineered around, over, or through. If you're really engineers you can apply the same disciplined thinking and logic to a problem outside your speciality as inside it -build a tunnel, road, or whatever around the roadblocks. Get the attention of those who can ramrod such actions and they'll make it happen. I guarantee no one at your company wants to see customers complain, but many will turn a blind eye to it because doing something about it risks upsetting the status quo.

I can't believe I actually needed to write any of the above.

To put an even finer point on it, don't release crapware and no one will carp about it being crapware.

Once upon a time the company I'd just become a partner in had a $1600 laser printer fail one month out of warranty. The manufacturer asked me to transport it 35 miles one way, wait a week, and then told me there was nothing they could do. I got annoyed, wrote the VP of Marketing for Panasonic directly(you have to do your homework, took less than an hour pre internet), told him of my problem and mentioned I'd CC'd a copy of the letter to the Pres.& Chairman of the board, and told them that failing a reply and a proper solution to my difficulty in the next week my next complaint would go to the letters pages of Byte Magazine & The Computer Shopper... Took 'em less than five days to get back to me(pretty good for snail mail) and send a guy from two states over who happily resolved our issue. When the carrot won't work you have to be willing to employ the stick.

If you're going to eat the carrot(take my money), then you better pull the cart(provide me with expected value), or prepare to get the stick(figure it out)... You don't like those rules? Maybe you're not cut out to just be a donkey pulling a cart. Maybe you need to be something better. If you weren't better than that anything said against your work wouldn't bother you. So go, become something better and stop asking those who have a right to expect what they pay for to live up to reasonable expectations to be quiet when it doesn't.

As a member of your company ask yourself what you're doing to resolve the issues the people who pay your salary(the consumers) are having. The people roadblocking you may sign the checks, but they don't pay your salary. Become better at what you do and find a way through.