I've got a Ritchey Pro stem, I like it. I see tons of these Pro and Ritchey Comp stems,have never seen a problem with one of them (they're OEM on a lot of new bikes). Sounds like you just happened to have gotten a defective one, which can happen with anything. Any LBS can order that stem from any number of sources, and returning it as defective would have been no biggie. That's what you do with defective products, you return them. You bought yours on ebay, and say it's too much trouble to return it.

I think starting a thread about this is silly. But then again, there are a lot of silly threads that get started here, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising.