Evidence supports the idea that for years on end, no one at G&L bothered to plug the basses (guitars too?) in before they left the factory. If someone had done so, there would never have been the infamous spring ping problem, that went on for years and often rendered an instrument unusable. Or, a worse scenario....if someone had plugged them in, heard all the extraneous noise, then decided that was "okay".
Such evidence does indeed exist. My Legacy HSS guitar arrived last year with incorrect wiring, so that when the humbucker was split, position two (bridge and middle) was not hum-canceling as it's supposed to be. In single coil mode, the wrong coil was active. That certainly could and should have been discovered at the factory if somebody had plugged it in. Rather than go through the warranty repair process, I had my local tech fix it. (I also think the neck is not perfectly aligned even after my tech tried to fix it, but it's probably within spec and it has great playability overall. But it should be
perfect, like my old Comanche's neck.)
I've owned seven G&L instruments including four option orders. Three have been absolutely perfect out of the box, and my SB-2 came with a truly minor cosmetic issue that doesn't bother me, so as far as I'm concerned it's perfect. That's four out of seven (57%) with no meaningful issues. Not exactly fantastic.
But two of the problem children have mitigating factors. For example, I was the third owner of a JB-5, so I don't know whether all of its issues can be attributed to G&L, but one certainly can: the idiotic short case that forced you to turn the D string tuning key, lest it bang into the end of the case and get damaged. Which mine did anyway, and needed to be replaced. Ugh. I bought another case for it (total score at $30), and sold its original case.
Also, my 2006 L-1500 came with a bad truss rod, which isn't entirely G&L's fault (assuming the rod came from a supplier), and when it finally had the right neck it was perfect. To this day it's probably the best playing bass I've owned, but my current G&Ls and Sandberg TT are darned close.