You’re absolutely right in that quality departments don’t, and shouldn’t, ignore anecdotes. Also that your actual quality is important but so too is the perceived quality of your product in the eyes of the overall market.
I was simply making the point that the perceived quality within conversations like this one rarely track well with the perceived quality of the product by the overall population of users, because most of the people who comment on threads like these have had problems (and are thus more motivated to discuss the issues they’ve had).
Editor’s note: Upon quick review of the thread, it seems I made a very similar comment about three weeks ago. The Daily Cannon regrets the error in posting a substantially duplicate post.