I've just got off the phone with Nintendo Japan regarding the dock, and will hopefully be being sent a replacement that isn't bent.
A few things I want to address:
"Just get a screen protector if you're worried about it"
This is nonsensical - People get screen protectors to protect their screen from day to day life interactions, like accidentally putting your keys in the same pocket as your phone, to protect against minor drops and scuffs, the idea of getting a screen protector in general is perfectly fine - HOWEVER, having to buy and install a screen protector to protect a device from its own stock accessories is completely and utterly unacceptable - It's up to the manufacturer to do the testing and development to ensure that a device performs in the proper way and does not damage itself from normal use.
The dock having issues with scratching the screen is not the users fault, even if someone takes it out roughly, the dock simply should not use abrasive materials against soft plastic surfaces.
If you bought a phone and it came with a special case that was an integral part of the phones design and added further features to the phone (i.e. the case was the only option you had to access those features), you would not expect that case to also gradually damage the phone under normal use - so it's not out of the question for people to expect Nintendo to ship a dock that doesn't damage the Switch under normal use either - especially when docking and playing on a TV is such a major selling point of the device.
Simply put, the end user should not be expected to pay an additional cost (no matter how low that cost is) to prevent damage from interaction with OEM accessories.
The people complaining about this are not "nintendo haters", they are not "shills trying to increase screen protector sales" (this one especially is laughable given that the go-to dismissal from that side of the argument point at screen protectors as the solution), they are just Switch owners who feel they shouldn't have to buy additional things or mod their dock to prevent damage - this is something that can and should have been addressed by Nintendo during R&D.
I see many, many people chiming in with "well mine doesn't have any scratches so i think it's all a lie" - as pointed out multiple times in the thread, the dock has an issue with being bent to varying degrees, thus it stands to reason that the scratching can and will occur with varying ease, too, just because you don't have scratches now, doesn't mean you won't forever, and each time you play docked and the docks plastic gets put through a heat cycle, the chances it will eventually bend inwards and touch the screen increases too. the number of scratched screen reports is only going to increase over the coming weeks and months, so why not address it now and get Nintendo to sort it out before they've sold too many for a replacement/solution to be financially feasible?
Secondly, the dock's design suffers from two critical issues:
1) Design - The guidance tabs inside the dock should not have been left as raw plastic, or at the very least, had their edges rounded off to prevent corners doing linear scratches, this is a massive oversight by Nintendo.
2) Manufacturing negligence - The sporadic and varied occurrence of bending in the front panel is most definitely down to the plastics mold injection process, and, from my experience in engineering suggests either the production line was moving too quickly and ejecting the molded plastic too soon, or calibration issues with spot checks for quality control not happening often enough to weed out such issues whichever (or even if both) are the cause, it's on Nintendo to put things right - Be it with a redesigned dock for mail in replacement for current owners, or an exchange program for people with bent front panels.
Dismissing the issue entirely is nonsensical, protecting your feelings about the system / Nintendo should not take priority over protecting consumers from shoddy product design.
