Interesting take.

It sounds to me (from the limited information in that article and the necessarily one-sided info from the RasPi forum) like the *factory* cocked up. They were given a spec for a component and used the wrong one.

"where we’d specified jacks with integrated magnetics in the BOM and schematics, the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks"

I'd say the RasPi guys (who may not have the experience to know that when you pay someone to do a job, and quite possibly outsource QA to them too... will still screw up) are the ones who should be nervous about the factory - and indeed maybe what you find amazing is actually that they trusted them to do the complete job.

I'm interested in why you say the RasPi guys told the factory "they didn't need any testing and just to ship the boards out..." and not the factory telling the RasPi guys?

In my experience (and granted, it's a million miles away from this environment) suppliers rarely say "hey, there's a good chance we'll screw up, I hope you have a plan to test our products match your spec before you trust us enough to ship"... quite the contrary.