You pay good money for a good car, it ought to work. Just venting, and certainly no offense intended, but I don't subscribe to your rationale in this case at all. If I bought some POS off-brand for 90 bucks, I could see that. But I went with AE because they are the best. I shouldn't have to accept quality control issues just because I didn't build it myself. I wouldn't buy a Porsche and expect to have to put the shocks together myself to ensure a quality build.
Mistakes in production happen. It's up to the company to ensure those mistakes are rectified in a way that wipes those mistakes from the customer's memory, and turns a negative experience into a positive one. Hopefully, AE is listening.
Since you're fairly new to the hobby, ThunderbirdJunkie understands your frustration and your position.
The simple fact is, if you want it built right, build it yourself. Experienced RCers have been calling RTRs "Ready to Rebuild" for a long, long time for a reason.
There are guys that build their own shocks that rebuild them every two weeks, and there are guys that change their shock oil every race day.
This is a maintenance-intensive hobby, end of story. Now, if you are upset about having to rebuild a set of shocks after two weeks of ownership, imagine what would be wrong with that $90 knockoff piece of crap you could've bought.
You bought a good car. But without knowing what conditions under which you're running, how badly/well you're driving, or how much the car has been run, it's entirely impossible to say whether or not you SHOULD HAVE to rebuild your shocks, and let's not get into the possibility that your car has seen more runtime in the past two weeks than ThunderbirdJunkie's has in the last 3 months...but ALL RTRS REQUIRE A SHOCK REBUILD AS SOON AS THE CAR LEAVES THE BOX. This has been a constant ever since the RTR was invented.
Also, you didn't buy a Porsche, you bought a reasonably priced sporty subcompact. There are guys in this thread that have spent more money on tuning parts for their B4/.1's than you spent on buying your RTR, so your cost analogy doesn't really hold much water.
Not trying to insult you or anything like that, just trying to put things into perspective. If you want Porsche quality, buy a Porsche, not a Civic Si or SVT Focus. There is a method to the madness when an experienced racer drops $300 on a speedo/motor combo, $300 on a car, $100 on parts for said car, $100/ea on batteries, etc...it's not because we're "stupid and could get the same car already built for 1/4 the price".