The grass is greener....

[Anomalocaris]

I bet there were more expensive mowers that were better built, but you didn't chose to pay the extra.

I bet like most consumers, you bought the cheapest one you deemed acceptable by feel, and then bemoaned the price to quality ratio is what you deemed ought to be.

$1,400 dollars isn't fucking cheap. And I bought it brand new. And used it very little. 

I don't give a fuck if someone thinks that is "cheap" for a mower. That is not cheap.

$1,400 should get you 5 to 10 years of use, with tons of abuse.

One tiny pin, not a baseball bat, not a crowbar, but a fucking sliver of metal. 

An earring stud that sits in your ear and does nothing makes sense. But that pin on my mower was responsible for keeping the tension between the gear shift handle and the cable to the gear box. That that should not wear out over 4 uses in a 2 year period.

Cheap is relative.   You have no particular right to a certain $/useful life ratio.  But you did have of the choice to do research, shop around, and adjust budget to improve the odds of getting $/Useful life ratio.

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I don't shop at Walmart.  Haven't in years.

Lots of large machinery contains small pieces of metal - nuts, bolts, pins, washers, etc.  I would be surprised if you had any mechanical aptitude.  If you did, you would know that.

It's not fun to have something break down but you have had the mower two years.  It's not like the first time you started it up it blew the fuck up.  After time and with use things wear out and you live near the ocean so there is also the moisture and salt air.  That's going to play hell on small pieces of metal.  It's hot there too.  That can gum up rubber parts or cause them to dry rot depending on how you store them.  I will assume you don't keep it in the living room but probably in a shed that isn't climate controlled.

I also don't know how to program a computer, so I also cant crash a passenger jet with software.

But no sorry, this failure was not my fault. It was bad design.

I have abused plenty of computers and plenty of tools in my life, this was not my fault.

So long as the design isn’t unsafe, they have no imperative to make it better unless you did your research and denied them revenue by not buying their wares.