Yeah, the highest quality products are usually made in the first 1% or less of the dies/tooling life, second rate products are made in the 2%-5% area, and your crappy products are made in the 5% or worse area. There's no excuse for burrs, filings, etc being in any product. I've been metal working, welding, machining, etc professionally for years, and any manufacturer with decent QC will wash/bathe their machined products in solution to remove oils, lubricants and filings and then place them in a vibrator/tumbler with ceramic agitators to deburr, it only takes a few minutes. There's no excuse for EK not to do this, especially for the astronomical prices they charge.
I've never understood the popularity of Ekwb products, they're nothing special. 8 honestly believe that "enthusiasts" too lazy to do some research just assume they're the best because their products are used in 8 of 10 builds on the internet (which bores the hell out of me when I see it BTW). EKWB = the Best has become a perpetuated myth at this point.
Personally I've always preferred Watercool's products, but in recent years, Bykski and Barrow are making just as good, if not better products, and if you purchase them of aliexpress like I do, you literally get them at half the price of domestic retailers like modmymods and performances.com (whom I guarantee just buy their stock off aliexpress and multiply the cost X2.) I've come to realize that the majority of PC "enthusiasts" are very ignorant in that, for example, they are completely unaware a product exists unless a PC brand like corsair or Phanteks slaps their label on it. For example, take addressable LEDs, no matter what IC you're looking for (WS2182B, AP102, SK6812, etc) you can literally purchase them at a quarter of the price of LEDs sold by corsair or other PC brands and better yet, they come with the LED industry standard 3 pin JST connector instead of these stupid proprietary connectors that corsair uses to lock you into an ecosystem (don't even get me started on the idiocy of Asus using that damn 4 minus 1 pin =3 pin connector for their addressable headers that for some unknown reason the rest of the motherboard manufacturers adopted. Why not just use a standard 3 pin jst connector?) Or those flexible neon addressable LEDs that phanteks just released, they've been available in various diameters for a fraction of the price for years, but then all these enthusiasts think phanteks reinvented the wheel by simply slapping their label on it. It just frustrates me when people reward these companies and their insane markup by being too lazy to take five minutes to do some research.
