Hmm. I'm still not convinced from other stuff on the forums that NYCBikes is a bad outfit, and again, my experience isn't bad - just mediocre, as rvabiker said. I don't think that I got ripped off (buying the raw parts for the wheelbuild would have cost me about what it cost me to buy the laced wheel, although I'm sure that their shop does it in higher volume). Honestly, I think the customer-is-probably-wrong-if-he-critiques-us attitude is the major determinant of NYCBikes' poor rep around these forums. Either that or evasion of the critique.
My central contention in each of my emails was that the wheel was poorly built up, undertensioned. It was true and round and correctly dished when it arrived (and was packed well), but I needed to bring it up to proper tension. And shipping won't cause a wheel's tension to drop much, if at all.
Will's last email was a fair bit of misdirection to evade this contention.
(1) The social-psych study citation about how people value things. Interesting, and probably true in many cases in retail. But it doesn't mean that I shouldn't expect a wheel I purchase, whether built of budget parts or top-line, to be properly tensioned.
(2) He said that the folks here on bikeforums "turned a good experience into a bad one" for me... which I don't think is the case. People in this thread just pointed out that I should at least expect wheels to be properly tensioned, even if it had gone a bit out of true or even tensioning from spoke to spoke during shipment.
(3) citing Do-It-Yourself ethos is nice, and I do most things myself (and suspect a lot of people here do as well), but is not a justification for mediocre wheelbuild quality.
Now, it's quite possible that with the low profit margins on wheels at this level, wheelbuild quality shouldn't be expected to be very good. Will may be right about his motive for "selling affordable gear because it gets more folks on bikes." But my default presumption is that wheels should be well-built even if the parts are lower-end. If this isn't a fair assumption, I'd at least appreciate to know that I'll need to do more than cursory truing after receiving a brand-new wheel - I told him that it would be worth writing this into the eBay auction.