Objectively, relative to the competion, you are correct; however, if you view today's objective numbers accross the industry in historical context, all companies, including Ford, continue to improve initial quality in agregate over time. Ford is plagued by escessive costs/incident versus quantity of unique mid to high mileage engineering related recall incidents - not an excuse, just a fact.
The point being, they should still have reasonably robust identification and containment capabilities for this type of relatively "rare" production or redesign escape. Furthermore, this is usually an easy thing to discover, track, troubleshoot, fix and prevent recurrance of. "Rare" meaning single, low volume, legacy, vehicle line affected over what seems to be an easily defined production time period. This is the type of thing that we used to solve in an afternoon; then we spent a few weeks following up on and finally firing or some other way abusing those responsible inside or outside of the company.