If you're building a product based on Raspberry Pi that you're selling to others, then sure I could understand the outrage.
Fortunately in this case it fails to 0V so it's not a dangerous or damaging failure, but still the spec literally hands you a schematic. Is it that hard to just copy it? Why did they even try to be clever and use their own design in the first place just to save a single 5.1k ohm resistor?
See also: People who like to get all creative with encryption library implementations in commercial settings. If implementing a standard protocol, unless you have a very good reason otherwise, you should;
1. Go and find the guide by the people who designed it.
2. Read the guide and make test thingies till you are sure you understand it.
3. Now go and do what the guide tells you to do.
$0.02 x 1E6 = $20k
If you are the circuit designer making, say, $150k, you just justified about a month of your salary (after accounting for benefits and other overhead). Your manager may parade you in front of the team at the next big group meeting as an example of how to achieve the BOM efficiency the company need to hit profit margin targets.
Seems like a really questionable cost-savings maneuver to switch to a way more complicated & expensive connector for nearly no reason, and then penny pitch on one resistor.
Also, SMT resistors at that quantity level are more like 1/10 of a cent, not 2 cents, and the PnP machine is running anyway. In fact you often end up using more resistors than strictly necessary, just because the machine holds a limited number of reels and it's cheaper to use more of the same part to arrive at a desired value than to add a new line item.
Things should be as cheap as possible, but no cheaper. Optimizing the cost of individual resistors is almost always a classic example of measuring the wrong thing. We should strive to avoid making excuses for doing that.
I 100% expect the SBC to work with any combination of charger and cable. I have lots of existing cell phone charges and cables so unless I were purchasing this for someone else I don't think I would consider ordering the branded raspberry pi charger/cable.
Compatibility with existing cables is a big deal; I won't be ordering my Pi 4 until sometime after this is resolved.
But it still worked with just a sufficiently powerful PSU, while the Pi 4 requires something implementing the USB-C standard. Honestly, I'd prefer a round plug I could use with a 12V PSU.
Have a hard look at the simple 'how can anyone possibly get a piece of wire wrong' cable, or even better test it.
It's enough of a usability fail that I won't buy one until it's fixed.