Ahick and Paul 03 - I'm not trying to start something here but your not basing your thoughts around any facts just that your not happy with the skid. Like it or not WE on THIS site of crazy people obessed with snowmobiling are the MINORITY, if you add up all the members here it, then add how many buy new yamaha's every year its a fraction of the total market for yamaha. I gurantee most yamaha buyers buy it run it for thousands of miles in 1-3 years and buy another one trouble free, I only know this based on what my local dealers owner told me when I was asking something unrelated to a warranty issue at the time he said he hasn't seen a sled since 06 in for warranty. Granted we are in Iowa and the volume is low but he sold over 500 sleds since then and that is 33 times more then the poll of 15 people on here that claimed the w arm is junk and defective and your roof will fall in as you sleep.
Why would they beef up the suspension in later years? They made lots of small changes over the years I doubt any of them came from advice on this site, maybe the new shock tuning revealed something needed to be done and they found new weight loss somewhere else and made the swap without impacting the dry weight. I'm not sure only yamaha really knows.
What kills me is you give a inch people take a mile, look back to sled in year 2000, were riding smoke machines with "long travel" suspension of maybe 6" in the back 4-5" upfront even though most claimed more, our knees were in our chests, and the engines that felt fast at the time seem like a slug now. For most of the people I would ride with 400-800 miles a year was a LONG year, now we do that in one trip. It was also a time based race of when you needed to sell before you needed a rebuild which ironically for most was around 4000 miles, some pushed the limits and there sleds were fine but they felt DAMN lucky they made it that far.
Now we push 8,000-45,000 miles on a single sled, times have changed.
These sleds continue to amaze me everytime I pull the trigger for speed, comfort, and reliability. I just feel the price of a used arm or reinforcing it yourself doesn't justify the constant rumbles of how Yamaha is intentionally not building quality stuff and trying to personally screw you over.
