if i can chime in with my experience, i've always had a good contact with CS by mail, no phone as i'm in europe and i can't really speak english very well.
they always replied within a couple of days, for informations or screws/clip request ... always received the parts quite fast ... no problem on this.
regarding sprint runs, imho this is just plain not acceptable. i clearly understand the sprint run thing, it's limited, that's the point. but loosening the tolerances and saying that a knife that's clearly defective is within specs because they have no way to fix it is not acceptable. i've followed a thread on this and if i where the owner i think this would certainly stop me from buying any more spyderco. keeping some spare parts is the bare minimum, i've never heard something like this in any industry of any sort, like you buy a special product, you preorder for getting it, you wait, and if it's defective ... what ? nothing? no service at all ?
for the lenght differences, i've had this on my XHP milie, and what bothers me is not the missing lenght and height (very noticeable) what bothers me is that the oversharpened blade has the cutting edge in a thicker part of the blade, my XHP one doesn't have the thin tip my other milies have, that's no big deal, it has replaced my digicam S30V as a "beater" milie but i expected something thinner.
on a side note, those threads can look alarming, but keep in mind that the few people that posted here are not very representative of all the knives in circulation or CS experiences. only the bad exemple show up...
