It's called planned obsolescence at least that's what it started with in the mid 90s. Nowadays it's just lazy development and the downside of disributed suppliers and just in time delivery creating ever greater problems in terms of make or buy and the consequent quality issues that entails. I'll tell you this, the rocker arms for this car I bought 3 times and before I found the right quality part in a small california parts dealer's online shop I actually went to BMW and asked them. Their part was gonna be more than 3 times what I paid for the 'good part' I ended up buying so I asked them what assurances I have that the part they deliver actually is worth the money. You know what they said? 'We can only assure you that the part is within our manufacturing standards requirements we give to suppliers. We cannot tell you what manufacturer it's going to be and generally nothing about the quality except that it meets the standard.'

I later found someone who had bought the BMW rocker arms, they turned out to be FEBI parts with milled off logos. No joke. The part apparently fits BMW's 'standard' of the day. I dismissed that part right out of the box, it was a joke in terms of finish. If you had delivered that kind of part into the BMW engine assembly line 30 years ago they'd have kicked your ass off the factory grounds faster than you could count up your POS rocker arms.

Today it's all a question of liability. The finance and legal guys and girls get together and determine exactly what threshold is good enough so they can make the product function for a while and just bad enough to satisfy cost and supplier reqs. In the end some poor fucker who has no idea what so ever about manufacturing or acceptable standards of fit and finish decides the 'tolerances' for third party parts and spreads the contracts out over just enough suppliers so that no one ever has any chance of holding anyone liable least of which the big B.

Different world here guys. No nostalgia and no dreaming just a raw fact and it can be explained rather easily.