Since when do "Philips" and "robust and lasting" go together in one statement?
Well, you are from the Netherlands, so you get to see the appliances that fall apart before they manage to reach the border.
Luckily things are a bit better in accordions, although I have seen design (and implementation) choices in accordions that bring terms like stupid, ridiculous and certainly not long-lasting to mind.
"export quality" used to be a thing with accordion reeds as well. With the original poster complaining about his 9 bass registers, I wonder what in terms of "stupid and ridiculous" he'd think about my 168 ones.
What more do I need than Bassoon, bandoneon , accordion, organ, mussette, clarinet!
You might have enjoyed a Contello I resold: all it had was Bassoon, Clarinet, Piccolo, Master (LMH) and I think Organ (LH). I never needed Piccolo and would have preferred to have Bandonion (LM) and/or Oboe (MH), though. For a 3-reed instrument, 7 registers don't really add a lot of size/weight.
And that's an issue with some of the things you complain about: once you have the reed sets anyway, additional registers add very little weight. So do additional bass buttons (a 40-button instrument already needs full reed sets with 12 reed plates in each set). Now all of the registers you list don't use a piccolo reed, so that is a real saving, making for an LMM accordion (somewhat frequent) or LMMM (more frequent). If tremolo is important to you, MMM sounds fuller than MM, as does, by the way, MMH from the more versatile LMMH configuration.
And on the bass side, seems 3or 4 switches could do the job. A Master, (don’t know the names), a low anchor note with gentle chords for beautiful songs, and a couple of fun switches.
How many of my registers do
I actually use? A very limited set, but a set that is tightly connected to the pieces I am playing and the kind of bass passages and chords they use. And there is no way that the accordion constructor would have known which ones they are.
To some people who say that they really only use the M register in cassotto with such a wonderful clarinet sound I would say: learn to play the clarinet. The accordion gives you "a complete orchestra in a small box", but the only really good sound it has is the accordion sound. (in my opinion this is the opposite of a Roland: pretty decent sounds of all kinds of instruments but not so good accordion sound.)
Gets me back to the Contello again: its "money register" was M (no cassotto but only leather valves and a very sweet sound). Loved that thing. Only reason I sold it was that it did not make sense for me to keep a piano accordion after going to button. Now on the downside, to balance such a single reed register on the right both in sound and weight when it is the main asset, you need a fairly dinky bass. And I have found that to be the main downside with accordions built for limited size/range/sound.
Make no mistake: 90% of the time I use my big accordion while engaging only a single chord reed. But it doesn't buzz the mechanics like the small instruments do, is at a nicer range, and is accompanied by a bass that is both low enough not to interfere significantly with the melody and to be a good match in size and character.
With regard to the number of registers one needs: my violin has one (more or less, with pizziccato and flageolet being rare exceptions). And my big LMMM accordion has nominally 7 on the treble side of which half make little sense. The rest needs to pull its weight, and does.
We need the bassoon because some music uses really low notes and we need the piccolo because some music uses really high notes...
My bassoon goes far lower than almost any piano accordion (Hohner Imperator VS does not count as normal in my book), and my clarinet and tremolo reeds go higher than the piccolo on a 41-key piano accordion. So cutting the piccolo reed bank does not come at a cost in range, and indeed if you want to cut through in the piccolo range, MMM does by far a more convincing job than H would at similar pitch. Of course, extending 3 reed sets (say) by one octave comes at a similar reed plate count as adding one 3-octave reed set. And there is the question of keyboard size: piano accordions are unwieldy enough with their standard ranges.
So to summarize, I can sort of nitpick around any particular choice, which makes my diatrabe end up at best slightly more differentiated than Paul's: building an instrument with a larger appeal will come at the cost of bulky and weighty options that may not all be necessary for all users. Limiting size will be taking choices that may disqualify the instrument with some customers while making it more attractive to others.
Custom-configured instruments exist but are not exactly cheap. With a shrinking market, producers have to counter by making more generic and less specialized instruments in order to have them sell in reasonable amounts of time.
According to the shop owner I got my instrument from, he had it sitting 15 years on his shelves and wanted to get rid of it. As a salesperson, you don't want to stock instruments appealing only to few people.
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