(Yes, I fully regret selling my previous gen MBP.)
Like another person on here said, these replacements & repairs hurt both the customer and the company.
I don't understand why Apple makes these drastic changes on major products without thorough, repeated, and lengthy QA processes.
What's happened?
There have been articles on Hacker News where people talked about it being extremely difficult for a hardware startup to do something as simple as achieving a uniform color to plastic components, or packaging their products in white cardboard like Apple.
One could argue that Apple is not accomplishing the goal of producing a premium product, but whether it is still a good strategy depends on a lot of numbers that are difficult to find. How much of the value of a MBP that is entirely replaced for the end consumer gets recycled back into the refurbished programs? 20%, 50%, 80%? What percentage of units have to be replaced? 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%? What is the margin on each unit sold? How much would fixed manufacturing costs increase if they retooled the entire line to revert to older style keyboards? How much is the damage to Apple's reputation costing them in dollar terms?
Perhaps they should focus on building a reliable premium product rather than a premium product that suffers failures due to too many gadgets (too put it simply).
As far as what is a better strategy for them moving forward on their policy re: replacement & repairs, they're probably trying to figure out what to do right now based off your mentioned hidden numbers.
I hope they do the right thing by the customer, as many of us are heavily invested in their product line, in multiple ways.