I had to look up SIQA - it looks like the V2100s moved those features to the Stock Library Manager which is where I access similar features. I watched a short video on the SIQA options and it's quite different from what my options are in the Stock Library Interface. I think it's just a fundamental difference in how the printer is handling alignment and registrations.
To be clear: I'm not that unhappy with the alignment issues. It works well enough for our purposes. Every machine has it's issues and since we can compensate for it in a down-the-line process that's a workable solution that gets the job done. No machine is going to do everything you wanted and life's too busy to stress about it.
Perfection: If there's anything I've learned is that you have to give up on the pursuit of perfection in this business, it's just an unrealistic standard. While I do feel customers might expect the margins to be perfectly even, I have only had 2 customers in 3 years even mention that the margins were uneven and when I explained the process and offered to trim a little on one edge to even it up they were fine with it.
I actually think your wife is correct - as much as I like perfect margins my experience is that customers don't tend to care that much or even notice AND it's actually less expensive to just let the customers who care complain about it and then just try to fix it for that one customer vs. reprinting the same thing multiple times. You'll learn over time which customers care a lot and which ones don't.
What helped me a lot was looking at printed products in the bigger box stores. The number of simply bad prints that are out there is crazy and before I got into printing I never noticed it at all which makes me think other people are similar.
