vehicles today coming out of the factory, its more about quantity than quality. Plus the use of cheaper parts, its garbage. I would of not gotten the ram had I had read some of this stuff before I was going to buy it.
You wouldn't have gotten anything better from another brand. And the good old days weren't so good - if you think quality control is bad now you should have seen quality control from the late 60's through the early 90's on American cars. Guys would find beer cans behind quarter panel trim, electric wires not hooked up, fenders with 2 bolts instead of 6, etc. The Japanese came in and started eating our lunch and the competition made *everyone* better. I will tell you that the last 4 or 5 new vehicles I've owned have been far better than the first 4 or 5, despite the fact that there's so many more features and things that could go wrong because of the complexity.
As far as parts quality, definitely some parts have gotten worse, especially non-cosmetic places where plastic has replaced metal for cost and weight purposes. And there's more outsourcing than ever before on vehicle parts, so maintaining quality standards on the front end is a lot more difficult.
Bottom line on the paint thing, though, is that it's unreasonable to expect show car paint jobs coming from assembly lines that produce a million vehicles. Paints have become thinner and air standards have changed flash times and solvents, and no one is going to do the prep and finish work to make thinner, cheaper paints look like the solid enamels of the past. Yes, trucks are expensive, but frankly I'm always surprised they don't cost more than what they do given the level of features and constant changes. The only reason they can even be sold for $40k is because they make a million of them, fast. The tooling, engineering, design work, assembly line computerization, etc costs eye-popping numbers, before you even hire the first guy to run the robots or buy the first part to put in the vehicle.