As quirks go, I don't think it's unusual. In my opinion and experience, mediocre organizations usually find a way to do one thing well. Good organizations can do two. Very rarely can great organizations exceed that. In Tesla's case, it's not making customer experience a core focus because it has other fish to fry. It feels like short term thinking, but, then again, the only way you get to the long term is by living through the short term. This is a company that has needed to raise $500m a quarter just to stay afloat, and will need to continue to raise that kind of capital for the foreseeable future. Priority 1 has to be get new products announced and priority 2 - more like priority 1.1 - is scaling up production. 5,000 - 10,000 current customers are grumpy with how proactive their pre-delivery experience is? Compared to the 325,000++ model 3 reservations and getting the gigafactory up to speed that's small potatoes.
Doesn't mean I'm happy about it of course. I'm buying a car that costs more than a house in large parts of this country and is by 2x the most expensive car I've ever driven and I'm getting worse communication and service than I did on the last Kickstarter campaign I backed? Doesn't feel good. But if I were a TSLA investor I'd probably be happier with that than a slower gigafactory development but expensive hand-holding of existing customers.
