Yep, point taken mate. Nice comment. I'm also the first one to promote maintenance. However, 99.99% of mower customers are not motor mechanics, so I would venture that a system as imprecise as this, is a good candidate for a bad design label. If you design something for consumers who just want a reliable machine to mow their grass every weekend so that they can get on with the BBQ, then perhaps it's not a bad idea to have a proper switching mechanism in place. If it confuses 90% of engine mechanics, then it likely is not the best design.
I read lots of reviews for all sorts of things. The take-out is that people just want things to work when they need it to work. In a mower, it's a weekly thing, so maybe 30 times a year. That's not even a lot of use, compared to the household coffee machine. It's easy for us to say "ha, don't you know that it crapped out because you didn't maintain it?" Well, yes, but maintenance should be for the expendable components of machines, like filters, batteries, blades, fluids, starters etc. I would classify switchgear as parts that should last at least the life of a machine, and on the basis of 30 uses per year, a switch should maybe last 100 years. For instance, I restore vintage HiFi gear, most of which are much older than these mowers. I don't think I've ever had to replace an on/off switch. Capacitors on the other hand are quite another story!
