DISCLAIMER: I am a private installer/builder and I have some pretty high standards for sabers.
I have only ever purchased one SF saber that was installed by SF, but I have gutted and repaired my fair share of them. I personally don't think it's correct or fair to judge SF negatively as a whole, even though I do acknowledge area's that could use improvement or general redesign. The vary nature of the business SF is in means that they don't have a single design or process that they can rely on repeating thousands of times a day with low skilled workers or automation. SF has done a a great job in my mind of trying to standardize their builds as much as possible even though differences in hilts, packages, and options necessitates nearly custom installs on most of their sabers. The sheer volume they are dealing in will of course generate a certain percentage of failures.
You can like or dislikes their hilts, there are some I love, some I can't stand, but that does nothing to reflect on the company, that's plain personal opinion. When it comes to the end product, it's about the user experience, and in the case of SF they have done some things right, and they have done some things wrong. And that is the case for every business, and certainly for all the other full service saber companies, big or small.
I give SF credit in that they have begun to make changes that in the saber community, especially among the installer/builders and smiths were over due or just plainly obvious. A perfect example is SF finally getting a real chassis. It is my belief that this simple change will solve a large portion of any installation related issues that have popped up. The SF install has never been a thing of beauty, functional yes, but behind the times and sometimes badly done. Addressing that issue shows some maturity on the part of SF and I hope they continue to display that.
There is still plenty of room for improvement for SF, it's a difficult thing to be as successful as they are in this field of business. We are a very picky and finicky lot, those of us who are in this hobby, people in hobbies tend to be. For us it isn't just a thing we do, or have, it's a passion and something we devote large swaths of our life and time to. In many ways we hold everything to the highest standards possible, sometimes unfairly and unrealistically, but that is the nature of any hobby driven by those who participate in it. We all own cars, but for the vast majority of us never become car enthusiasts, at least not to the point of building custom cars, racing them, rebuilding them, etc. To those folks who are, they can go pick a new Camry off the lot and tell you everything about why it's a garbage car and you should never buy it. Despite the fact that the extreme vast majority of people in the world could care less what the transmission is, or where the leather came from, or how the fuel injection ratios should be this or that. To most of us, if we sat in one or drove it, we'd be like, "Yeah it's a car, its nice". The same holds true for SF, in a lot of ways they are a Toyota getting picked apart by custom car builders, super car owners, and a host of other snobish car enthusiasts. Only in this case it's a saber for the masses being picked over by custom saber builders, people who own collections of thousand dollar+ sabers, and a whole flock of hobbyists who hold everyone to nearly impossible standards.
SF serves multiple niches in the hobby. For many people they are an entry point. They also have a very large selection of hilts that you can get empty and in turn serve a huge part of the third party installers market. I would never expect SF to put out saber that all said and done runs in the thousands, that's just not who they are. but I do expect them to continue to improve and adopt new methods and technologies as they become feasible. If there is any knock I would make it would be their slowness to have made certain changes and improvements, but we are finally starting to see some of those and hopefully they continue to do so.