[davidmanze]

There seems to be a large number of people complaining about centering/alignment issues with the lens, apart from how a decent copy should perform.

I had a poor copy too, and complaining on the internet does not seem to make any difference apart from informing a tiny portion of people for any possible issues. As David might have already noticed in DPreview's forum, where I have shared a pic, there is always some portion of users who refuse to see obvious problems with a product, and insist that the black is white.

In the case of LensTip - tests require time, and require that you have the product available. More products to choose from = more time to test each one of these. At the end - what is the review that you are going to publish? The best product, the worst, an average? Should you take outliers out, or they are representative and should also be included? In their case - as this particular lens seems to be suffering from Quality Control issues, publishing a review with the findings of the lens that you might get yourself, is the right thing to do.

As a side note - the Japanese government is not happy how dependent Japan has become from components that are manufactured in China, plus they are also suffering from the trade war between China and USA, so they are proposing measures to get some of the exported manufacturing back in the country. If this also happens with some photographic companies, I wonder how would that impact the quality of the products, and what happens to people who have bought the Chinese 24/1.8S, which sufferers from inconsistencies, when a (possibly updated) Japanese version pops out.

Hi faint ....
   I just want to confirm "faint's findings" as to the de-centering of the 24/1.8S lens ....... it's showing pretty bad softening in just about everywhere in the image except in the center ...... at F4 !!
.....unfortunately, there are one or two "hewn in stone Nikonians" who stubbornly refuse to see a fault of the lens and can only see the fault of the user and their image testing choice/procedures.
  It's is worrying that there is obviously very little testing done after assembly apart from the "does it work" variety ...... as faint's lens would never have passed an optical control had it been checked .....
  Us lens enthusiasts know to check lenses as soon as we receive them ........ but many don't and find out a little later down the road when it's too late ......
  More complicated lens formulas in turn need better levels of assembly and it doesn't seem to be happening!
  ......... I'm not sure it says so much about China as it does about Nikon's attitude to QC ...... 
   With Canikon vying for MLC market share Nikon would do well to get on top of the problem before it gets like it was with Sigma six or seven years ago!

BTW. Reading around from level headed 24mm S owners, there is indeed some slight corner softness until stopped down a little which is substantiated by the Lenstip review ..... they are also one of the sites that is sensitive to lens prices .... so when a lens presents itself for testing as a replacement of a previous model at twice the price or more ...... they want to see where that money went ...... and their text therefore criticises the lens more than their resolution/ test results do! ........ as a result Lenstip received many criticisms .........
Anyway with the course of time let's hope that Nikon's assembly lines get into the swing of things and find out where these little alignment discrepancies are coming from.