1. The BBB rating is pretty much a sham to be quite honest. I wouldn't take it very seriously. HTC probably knows this as well. The BBB has really no power in itself since its a privately funded company, and not a government agency.
2. This isn't a coincidence. The happiest original Xbox owners are the ones that have modded them to have 500 GB hard drives and XBox Media Center. The happiest Escort owners are ones that put mods on their cars for added performance and aesthetics. People that modify products are the ones that actually care about how it performs and such and want it to work they way they want now, instead of waiting on the manufacturer. When you do it, it brings satisfaction in the fact that you were proactive and did it yourself. Feels good man.
Many people that I know are perfectly happy with their stock Eris's. I absolutely despise using them, but hey, each to their own.
1. In my experience, a BBB rating is a good indication of the type of service you're going to get it. Largely because once it reaches the BBB, it means the mechanisms the company has in place to take care of complaints have failed on multiple levels--no one calls the BBB before dealing directly with the company for a while.
While the BBB has no power in and of itself, it is an accurate report of what you can expect from a company--that's where its power lies, by helping to prevent future customers from having to deal with the same hassle.
A company whose internal mechanisms have failed and have continued to fail when an organization that can affect their public reputation has stepped in to arbitrate is generally a company that doesn't care about their products, their customers, or their company itself. For a company to get an F rating, they either have to be a really shitty company, or they have to be actively trying to appear that way.
2. There are many happy non-modded original Xbox owners. I'm one, and all but one of the people I play with/have played with are non-modded and very happy because the Xbox provided a great experience out of the box. While those who mod might get additional satisfaction, that's a completely different story: those are people who want to enhance what's already great and make it greater, not people who want to bring the product up to acceptable levels from barely usable levels. (And given how many critical hardware and software bugs the Eris has, "barely usable" is certainly an understatement.)
When we're discussing HTC products, we're not talking about enhancing great functionality. The default advice around here when something is wrong is, "root it," with a general resignation that it's the only way to help the user at all. It's already a base assumption that the device isn't going to deliver a satisfactory experience, so even people who have no idea what they're doing are being told to alter the device in ways they might not understand just to get functionality that the manufacturer is responsible for.
That's not acceptable, and it means the manufacturer did something very wrong if the base expectation is that their build isn't good enough. I find it quite odd that people would have such a low level of expectations and still waste their money on such a company's products--it's nothing short of ridiculous. That may be fine for a niche market of tinkerers, but it certainly qualifies as "shoddy products" for a normal market. They are, afterall, selling Android phones, not DIY Android kits.
