Chris Coffee has the absolute best customer service in the business and in fact in any business as far as I have experienced myself and from others I know who use them as a trusted vendor. If there was a problem with a new V2 La Spaz I firmly believe they would have made it right regardless of how much time or effort it took and on their dime (as it should be). I have had warranty part failure and a new one was drop shipped to my door arriving the next day. This seems like a pretty simple problem of offset temperature. The V2 is programmed so the set temperature is that of the water hitting the puck at the group and not the boiler temperature ( a nice feature in my opinion). If the owner was prepping good coffee beds with no channeling and getting horrible sour espresso it would be a simple diagnosis that the temperature was too low. Did this person attempt to contact Chris and get a fix? I am totally confident it would have been done in short order. There is a very long list of highly satisfied customers from Chris Coffee in good part because they take care of the customer needs after purchase too.
As usual, you missed my point - probably intentionally so you could make an absurd point. He was an inexperienced user with nothing to compare it to. He thought the problem was him, not the machine. By exchanging machines with him for awhile he could develop his skills on a machine he knew to be properly tuned.
And how many calls do you suppose a service center gets that go something like this, "Hello, my Whizz Bang 3000 won't make good espresso so I want to return it.", "No, I've never been shown how to use an espresso machine but your sales person said it's a piece of cake, so I'm assuming the machine is broken, so I want to return it for a refund."
Call any of the retailers and ask if they have machines that've been returned that work perfectly? All of them do, unless they're drop ship retailers.