Oh god, is this turning into Bash Forged Thread #2?
I'm not gonna go out on a limb defending them or bashing them. Like I said, eventually every longer-term well-known shop goes through some drama like this, and it's too easy to get more worked up about it than it deserves. Right now Forged is in the midst of a
PR battle over this GT-R incident, of course they're gonna care about keeping people that have bashed on them excessively out of their own events.
While we're on the subject: I was having this sort of philosophical conversation about all of this with a friend a couple days ago while he was helping me work on the Z. We were talking about the whole do-it-yourself versus paying a tuner debate, and the amount of time and effort that has gone into some of our past and current projects, etc.
He brought up this related story about re-wiring the IH Scout he's currently building in his garage. He's spent weeks on that project with some custom harnesses and relay boxes and bits, getting it all perfect. Even on an older vehicle, wiring a whole car from scratch is no easy job. So his wife asked him, basically, "Why don't you just pay someone to wire this up?" Leaving aside all the "I enjoy working on my car" stuff, the bottom line as we figure it is you really *couldn't* reasonably pay someone else to do this kind of labor. It requires a little thinking and skill, and a crapton of time. If you were to charge fair labor and parts rates, you'd have to charge someone $5K just to do this wiring job, and nobody's going to pay $5K for something they can slowly get done on their own in the garage as a hobby.
This gets down to what's at the crux of all the tuner-shop debates, to me. What customers ask of them, and expect of them, costs a lot more than anyone's willing to pay, usually. Deeply modifying a car takes a lot of time, involves a lot of frustration, and it adds up to way too many hours, more than you'd think. If someone tells you they'll slap a TT setup into a non-turbo car for $12K parts+labor and be done in two weeks, you have to ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, because it doesn't add up as a business model if they're doing a really badass job on the labor.
If you've really got lots of money to burn, you can pay an expensive shop to do it right, and it will take a while. If you don't, your honest choices are do it yourself or don't do it at all (or live with something shoddy). Not that any of this necessarily has direct bearing on the recent Forged incident, but it's just food for thought in this general vein. The guy spent a lot of money, but it was over a long period on many unrelated things, and he made several design-change requests along the way that required re-work, etc. I think a lot of the tuner community has illusions about what kind of quality and timeframe you can expect for what kind of price.