ss is a price-point company and appears to source most parts from overseas, liekly China or elsewhere in the East. I doubt ss manufactures anything. Chinese rods seem to be pretty sturdy, with Eagle, Scat, IB and others buying from there. A Scat employee told me it finish machines it's rods in the U.S., which is probably its way of standardizing and ensuring final quality while delivering something at a very modest price. Other U.S. companies do the same, I understand.
I think big part of the ssautochrome bad reputation comes form broken welds on exhaust manifolds, at least at some point in time.
As for the ss cams, problem for us could be that they are billets, I believe, which have a reputation of being too hard for the Honda Rocker pads, wearing them down at a high rate. Generally, billets are used in roller rocker applications - this is pretty much the consensus among performance builders, so I will assume there is something to it.
It's instructive to note that often times we are complaining about brand X and touting brand Y, when in fact, both X and Y buy from the same source and slap their brand on it after unloading it from the ship.
Amongst the ss line of products, there may indeed be some suffering from lack of quality, yet others that are equal to, or the same, as those sold at a higher price by another company.
R&D for a lot of performance companies amounts to time spent sourcing products from other countries. I think companies with racing programs offer the best opportunity for performance and quality, though they too can suffer from quality problems due to their sources' quality issues.
Company xyz racing may have some great cams ground in the U.S. for their winning car and discover that the only place to get them made cheap enough to be competitive in the consumer market is in China. The Chinese company tools up for the production and fits them into the production line, along with the cams it builds for half a dozen other U.S. companies. With all the parts generally on par, the real difference may be little more than the U.S. company's quality control. In other words, do they send back this batch of cams just off the ship because they don't pass QC, do they fix them in a secondary operation, or do they pump them out to the stores the way they are? The company that pushed them into the market takes its chances and usually pays the price for its mistake. Funny though, as the guys who sent parts back to China gets a reputation for not being able to deliver product.
Meanwhile, there's a company that got a good batch the month before and shipped to stores and everyone heaps on the praise.
Car parts are getting to be a bit like wine - there are good batches/vintages and there are bad. Like wine, it often is about the ingredients, and to that extent, the American company is at the mercy of the Chinese cam grinder, who is at the mercy of his blank provider, and the blank maker is at the mercy of the steel supplier, who in turn is at the mercy of the mining company...