Stan and Al, youse guys obviously know the rest of the story, which mostly explains why EMPI, for better or worse, is what it is today.
I come at it as an unwashed consumer trying to make sense out of some particular parts that are substandard junk.
The odd thing is that the brakes themselves seem to work OK. They stop the car. Without fade or wobble. The rotors haven't warped and the wheel cylinders haven't leaked. The eBrake even holds pretty well. In a car this light, the brakes (especially the rear brakes) aren't stressed too hard, but they do seem to be doing what brakes should do. And, as Stan points out, at a bargain price.
But I have a hard time understanding this bracket, uh, 'situation'. Best I can guess is that the kit originally came with the cast brackets - which also seem to work just fine. But production costs for the brackets must have gone up a lot at some point, putting EMPI in a bind. Raise the product price until it's in a different market segment, or keep it the cheapest 'name' brand product and find a way to cut production costs.
(The 'good' brackets are currently $230 a pair - nearly the price of the whole rest of the kit).
In the end, EMPI chose to cheap out and basically ruined the product. The stamped brackets cause at least two serious problems that I know of. In the classic Asian strategy of weakening something until it's just strong enough by a thin margin, they went just a little too far, and screwed the pooch - leaving it for the consumer to discover.
The guys who originally started EMPI probably would have never sold the crappy brackets, but these are the kind of decisions that get made when bean counters are in charge. And in today's markets, many companies seem able to survive ONLY if the bean counters are in charge.
Caveat emptor. Caveat EMPI.