With all due respect, your experience is so limited that it means jack ****. My Dad has had poor experience with Japanese cars and no trouble with American cars. So his experience cancels yours out.
Your arguement is exactly what I am talking about. You cannot judge an entire nation's cars, or an entire locktype from experience with a few examples. Your sample size is woefully small.
Studies have been done on intial quality, number of defects per model, time spent in shop, and number of miles before overhaul, and American cars are neck and neck with Japanese cars. This trumps your itty, bitty amount of experience with only a small handful of cars.
Also, different countries had had good and bad times. In the 80s, American cars were at a low. If you have had bad experiences with American cars from the 80s and even into the 90s, and are using that experience to judge American cars made today, or before, you are making a very silly mistake. Japanese cars have also had low periods, as have European cars.
If you will not buy an American car, it is your loss and your silly mistake. I try to judge each car on its own merit. The nation lines it happens to be designed or built in don't mean anything.
In fact, many Japanese cars are designed by Americans and built by Americans. Yet somehow they magically are more reliable. There's a reason the amount of defects per hundred cars is virtually the same for American and Japanese cars.
The same ignorant reasoning that you use is the reason the public sees the Dodge Stealth as an unreliable, gas-guzzling, poor-handling American car, while the Mitsubishi 3000GT is a reliable, economical, sporty Japanese car. Never mind that they are identical mechanically.
If I sound like a biased American car fan, well, I am not. I do like American cars, but no more than Japanese cars. I love the Corvette, but I also love the NSX. My favorite cars are small, light, bare-bones sports cars. So while American makes some examples of this, they aren't very common. My favorite is England.
I am just going by the facts, not ignorant prejudice based on limited experience. The facts about American car reliability doesn't change whether I am an American car fan or not. I knew a Mexican that was good at soccer but bad at math. That must mean they all are, right?
Have you tried other BM liner locks? Just because yours had a problem doesn't mean most do. Closing under white knuckling is more a problem with the overall design of the knife and how it fits your hands than a poorly done liner lock. In other words, the same lock and tang on another knife (with a different shape) might not have the same problem. So try a BM liner lock other than a 910 and see if the problem remains.
And, IMO, Al Mar and Lone Wolf do liner locks better than BM. There are also a multitude of custom knife makers that use liner locks, but I assume you meant production knives. I think BM does them well, but not the best.
BTW, sorry if I sound like a jerk. I have nothing against you and just find that jerkism gets my point across.
I don't mind a good discussion on the forums. 
