Is it likely that the steel comes plated from the steel factory - or would you guess HD Sports does its own plating?
I'm not making excuses for them - their quality control folks should have rejected the blades regardless - just wondering.
Aside from looking bad, and making rust more likely, if plate falls off on one side and not the other, or falls off asymmetrically, it seems intuitively like it would act somewhat like a non-level (or worse, an irregular level) sharpening.
Plus this is something that should be pretty obvious to both the skate tech and the buyer. They don't need to take any high precision measurements - they can just look at the blade.
Maybe HD Sports should hire a decent figure skater to head their quality control department. People who pay premium prices for high end blades expect to get premium quality. I wonder why HD Sports' management doesn't understand that.
I hope a lot of skate techs return the blades as defective. Maybe that would be a sufficiently unsubtle hint.
But I guess JW and MK blades are too popular for it to make economic sense for pro shops to stop dealing with them...