Wow. So surely the money they saved on packaging went to QC right?
A bean counter found another way to cheapen the product. Sad.
Even before the recent spike in fuel costs (which will undoubtedly increase costs even more), it's been a topic on the news for the past year that shipping costs from the far east have increased 250-300%. So I highly doubt they're wringing more profits out of the sale of these products. Especially given the miniscule production runs of these scale products.
Furthermore if one bothers to look, the retail prices between the traditional line of products and the vast majority of scale products are minimal given the all the tooling investments being made on the scale side. It takes years to recoup those tooling dollar investments, which until that point, the train company is not making any money on that product. Many companies have said this. And the HO companies have the advantage of bigger market share, thus bigger production runs, so they can recoup those investments quicker.
Lionel has always said it is the starter set traditional line of products that keep them profitable and in business. So maybe they need to double the prices on all the scale products so that they contribute in the same way to Lionel's profitability as do the traditional products, instead of the traditional line subsidizing the scale product line up.
And maybe if some of the other train companies had some "bean counters" working for them, they'd still be around today. I doubt any "bean counter" would have allowed K-Line to get $4.8M in the hole. Maybe you should be thankful for the so-called "bean counters" and that Lionel is bothering to make products with production runs of a few hundred items.
Another addendum on the topic of QC: I don't know how it is done. There's the Pantone system of paint samples. But some of these individual road production runs are as small as a few dozen. By the time Lionel could get a photo of a sample (if that's how it is accomplished), the production run is finished. It doesn't take that long to spray a few dozen shells with the correct (or incorrect) color.
I bring this up because on another thread about the recently shipped Atlas GP7's, there are 4 photos posted by Purplepapa of the same exact engine under different light conditions. Same engine, but by these photos they look like two entirely different models. And just to be clear, Purplepapa apologized for the difference in the photos. But I repeat them here because the differences in color of the locos based on lighting conditions is amazing... one could easily believe these are two differing engines instead of the same model. Maybe, just maybe part of the challenges faced by the train makers when your factory is on the other side of the world in a different time zone.
Fast-angle MPC style wheels again ??? 
I'll never be upper management material 
