As a long time 'industry guy' I look at this rather differently..
The reality is that there are probably 4 top end Taiwanese manufacturers and another 6 mainland China manufacturers of 'commercial' carbon frames. Outside of that there are probably another dozen or so very high end custom or near custom US and European companies in this game..
Of the Asian manufacturers, Giant is without a doubt the best or at worst second best player... this is why they openly produce for Trek and Colnago and quietly produce for a handful of other high level brands. From my experience when we were developing the first fully automated bicycle CFD programming at Zipp, we laser scanned hundreds of frames to create CFD models and the Giant built frames stood out as being straighter and better aligned than most. By the end of that project we had modeled a few hundred frames and the engineers who cleaned up the scan data to make CFD models could quite literally tell which of the frames were made by Giant by their overall accuracy and alignment.
Having said that, there are true handmade makers out there such are Parlee (in some models), Allied, Alchemy, Calfee, FiftyOne, Crumptom, Appleman, and others that I'm just not recalling at the moment who are truly handmade outside of Asia using very different methodologies that are a completely different story altogether..
I don't always agree with Giant designs in terms of aero, aesthetics, or maybe some other features, but from a manufacturing point of view, they build a top not frame with exceptional dimensional accuracy and excellent warranty/service/support backend, and the do it at a very fair price. I would also point out that since they build frames for some of the top brands, they also have to do their own things while not looking too much like any of the brands they produce for.. which is not easy..
Josh
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