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SIG has absolutely been trying to leverage the fact there is a culture war to shout down people who now believe their guns are unsafe.
The ultimate problem with the P320 is that it's a case study in extreme cost cutting.
Once upon a time, there was the P250. It was a very modern handgun, with a very mechanically simple firing mechanism. This mechanism is inherently extremely safe for the same reason it's safe on revolvers: the trigger pull is heavy, long, and even if the hammer let go and hit the firing pin somehow it couldn't hit the bullet hard enough to fire it. You don't need any other safeties[1] on a gun like this.
But the same things that made the gun safe and simple to manufacture also made it basically dead on arrival- the trigger pull is long and heavy. Not great for accuracy, or shooting all that quickly, or particularly usable by people who don't have a strong trigger finger. Understandably, sales weren't great.
Now, because modern guns cost far more in tooling to make than non-modern guns, SIG might have been in a bit of a hole financially. The plastic grips and triggers[2] for the P250 may be dirt-cheap to make on a per-unit basis, but the moulds for that plastic are incredibly expensive. To a lesser degree, this is also true of the barrels and slides (when you consider the CAD work for the outside and everything forward of the magazine would need no changes).
So SIG's engineers set to work designing a new firing control mechanism to fit in the same footprint as the old one[3]. By doing that, they could sell it as an upgrade for P250 owners, and recover the costs of that tooling- so they reused the maximum number of parts they could get away with and off it went to consumers.
It's at this point the problems start showing up:
[1] The new firing control mechanism is fundamentally less safe than the old one- they went from a gun that's completely incapable of firing a bullet at rest to one that is intentionally designed to do so (which in a vacuum is a perfectly valid thing to do: it makes the trigger pull much better than it is on competing pistols). So, design decisions that were fine on the old gun are all of a sudden not fine on the new gun- now they need a bunch of additional safeties to make sure the firing pin absolutely can't let go when the gun is dropped or when you pull the slide back a little.
This is what the second recall did- they milled out a bit of the slide and added another safety to it so the striker couldn't drop unless the trigger was pulled.
[2] The new firing control mechanism only needs a fraction of the trigger pull force, and a fraction of the total travel distance, to release the striker. Because inertia means things in motion stay in motion, a heavy enough trigger may have sufficient inertia that when the gun stops (by hitting the floor at a particular angle after being dropped) it still has enough potential energy to release the striker on its own. Now, in a vacuum, having a heavy trigger is a perfectly valid thing- if your gun can't fire until the trigger travels a great distance back under 10 pounds of force, there's no problem- but it stops being fine when the trigger no longer has to come that far back and must have much less force applied to it to activate.
This is what the first recall did- they replaced the heavy P250 plastic trigger with a much lighter one.
[3] The new firing control mechanism makes engineering compromises to stay within the footprint of the old gun. Those compromises include things like the effectiveness of mechanical safeties, as well as requiring certain parts be held to much more exact tolerances (because the size they'd normally be isn't possible on a retrofit like this). Now, if SIG kept making those parts to the initial standard, that's fine- but more exact tolerances cost more money. So, if you tell your subcontractors they can take shortcuts, and they do, a design that was just barely safe if made to those initial tolerances is now no longer safe, so the guns fire on their own.
This is why they're fucked now. They've sold so many, at so low a price (enabled both by being able to reuse tooling and aggressive subcontracting), that doing a recall is likely financially infeasible. SIG doesn't know which guns had parts made by which contractor or when they were made, so they can't guarantee that any gun is safe, and taking them all back to put parts made that are actually to standard in the first place is conceivably going to cost them more money than they ever made from the guns in the first place.
I understand they're fucked because initial design had a Glock-style trigger insert safety that would have prevented firing unless it was depressed.
Sig claims some potential customer was against it, so they removed it, and then went on to produce guns which will fire at the slighest shock if a certain combinations of part sizes is involved.
Seems like an incredible management oversight, because the gun designers must have been aware of this, and if the management did not test out how a gun with maximally bad part tolerances would behave, they basically fucked themselves.
That's the least what you should do - the people who engineered the trigger mechanism should have been able to figure out how to avoid this and what's the most dangerous combination of sizes.
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How do smaller companies like Wilson combat make aftermarket grips at a profit? Are they using a different manufacturing technology, charging more, or riding on the original SIG R&D?
The MBA-generalized response to this would be:
When you are selling low volumes to highly motivated customers, you can capture niche's (or "sub markets") by doing a lot of direct marketing and building brand loyalty.
When you're operating at scale (Glock, SIG, et al) you have to go after larger markets with customers who blend concerns beyond ultra performance (i.e. price) and so you start to make some level of compromise. This is where your strategy comes in; are you the "cheap" brand (Taurus, I guess? idk), are you non-innovative but dependable (Glock), are you the innovator (SIG ... I guess?) etc.
The same logic can be applied to a lot of different industries.
As an aside, but it's interesting, this is why there are dozens or hundreds of ultra-speciality rifle manufacturers. Some only specialize in barrels and then plop them on other companies' hardware. Many of these places like to boat about their contracts with the Navy SEALS / Special Forces / CIA whatever. In reality, this can be 1 - 3 guys in their converted garage more or less hand making every product they ship.
They're selling to a price insensitive (gov't dollars!) ultra-niche customer with super high performance requirements and, to no small extent, the "fuddlore" mentioned above. More charitably, customers operating at that level of performance just tend to develop biases that are mentally hard to shake. Does the trigger being polymer-x instead of polymer-y make you shoot better? Probably not, but being mentally comfortable with your gear probably does make you shoot better.
What happens to shops like this is they either go out of business because they lost one key customer (often, their only customer) or they become reliable enough lifestyle businesses for the owners - they make a very comfortable living and work on something they have a genuine passion for. Very few of these companies get purchased by one of the big names in the gun world unless there's something truly interesting going on. Things like actually interesting engineering development, perhaps something patented, or the development of a new product or market. Custom, tricked-out AR-15s weren't really a thing until after the Global War On Terror was several years into its run but, then, dudes who never go to the range were suddenly ready to drop a few thousand dollars into AR mods. Enter Bravo Company Manufacturing and all the others like it.
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From the looks of Wilson Combat's products (in particular) it looks like they're banking on people buying their product to change something about the grip angle of the gun (there are a couple of them that mimic the 1911/DWX) or to have a convenient way to make it heavier.
(Why you'd want to make a plastic gun heavier like that instead of just buying something like a Q5SF Match is another question entirely, but it's not like it costs WC anything to market it as "you could do it".)
For the P365 in particular, the WC grip is a affordable replacement with ergonomics (thickness) that many people prefer. Weights can be added as well, for those who want them, for recoil management.
There's a huge aftermarket parts industry for both the P365 and P320 because of their modularity.
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