Maybe they're all that counts in product design, but Toyota is the world's largest car manufacturer (by volume) largely on the back of their reputation for value, quality and reliability, and the same can be said for Honda in the motorcycle world. Perceived quality does matter for sales, and reliability plays into that in a major way. You can build a crap product and sell it for less (Stellantis anything), or you can sell past unreliable based on prestige and performance (BMW cars), but KTM isn't cheaper, nor are they prestigious enough that people don't care about reliability.
Aprilia is another example. Fair or not, their V4 has a reputation for dropping valves (it was absolutely an issue in early V4's but has long since been sorted out). This combined with their limited dealer network and Piaggio's less than stellar rep for warranty coverage and parts availability have definitely affected their sales, especially in North America. Ducati, on the other hand, has enough brand cachet that people will look past perceived quality issues, similar to BMW cars.
Separately, the other factor for the Euro makers is they subcontract so much of their parts manufacture to Asia, which makes supply chain management a much bigger piece of the puzzle. In the case of KTM's cam issue, they're laying the blame on China-produced finger followers as being the wrong hardness (possibly too hard and/or abrasive), too narrow, and with too much dimensional tolerance. What folks assumed to be soft cams now appears to be incompatible followers wearing the cams prematurely. The solution has been to widen the followers, alter the metal composition (possibly softening, though they haven't confirmed that), and tighten up tolerances. All of this is external, and the tone of the interview I heard with the KTM PR guy is that they were implying this wasn't a KTM issue, despite them contracting with that supplier, providing the design and being responsible for QA/QC.
(They also have reported issues with oil ducts being plugged with milling debris, which is 100% a KTM issue from the factory in Austria, but have unsurprisingly downplayed that as a factor, despite also installing replaceable filters for those ducts.)
My understanding is the Japanese factories produce a much larger percentage of the components in-house, which gives them far more control over QA/QC and makes them much less vulnerable to a bad supplier. They also, stereotypically, seem to have a different culture about conservatism around development of new products, taking more time to get things to market and seemingly dialling back performance to gain reliability.
I can't speak for boats, but as someone who has been casually paying attention to the RV market as we rent trailers but are always thinking about buying (makes zero financial sense, but is definitely more convenient), my sense is the issues in that market are less about used models flooding sales and more about people not buying the new ones at anywhere near the volumes still being produced. In other words, it's not that new buyers are buying used, it's that new buyers have disappeared. Part of that may be the ridiculous financing people sign up for with RV's where they're so far underwater pretty much permanently (owe too much to start, value plummets as it ages and it's worth very little later despite still owing a lot), so they bite the bullet and hang on rather than sell. We went to a lot where they wanted us to sign up for 15 year financing. It's not a bloody house.
In the corner we're looking at (lower midrange, Azdel, <5000 lbs), I see very few used examples for sale, but I see stacks of '22, '23 and '24 models clogging up dealer lots. You could get some very good deals this fall by picking up a '24 as the dealers scramble to make room for '25s coming in.
Absolutely it is. As
@GreyGhost notes, it bears a lot of parallels to GM in the car world. Another parallel is GM added to their mess by building extremely unreliable vehicles for a number of years, despite often charging a premium (see GM trucks from the '90s and '00s). Unusually for my lifetime, they seem to have completely reversed course and if JD Power and CR are to be believed, now make much more reliable vehicles right near the top of manufacturer averages. I still struggle to think of a GM as a quality product after a lifetime of considering them basically junk, though, despite the data seeming to show otherwise.
