Jackdaw,
I agree that Hanlon's Razor may be the answer especially if you had production staff changes.
Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" or Occam's Razor "among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected" certainly suit most situations.
I think so.
But I also am pretty sure the Money Guys didn't kill O'day.
Like many of the builders that got big due to the sailing boom of the 60s and 70s, O'day had a fairly loose (by today's standards) engineering and QA oversight process. That was somewhat OK, because the men and woman that built the boats had been there from the start. Things could be a little bit 'loose' because the market was booming. People learned, did there jobs, got paid. Because new orders came in. Then it stopped.
Why? Not because of leveraged buyouts. Because the big year over year growth in sailing JUST STOPPED.
Look at this slide from my buddy Nick Hayes, who wrote Saving Sailing. Look at the Blue line, the number of sailors in the USA. As that number grows, people have to by new boats. It's the only way to get one. Once it flattens (or drops), it's now cheaper to buy a used boat unless there is good reason not to.
Things got tight, and crazy. People left. People got let go. New people came in. Things that were done from memory now didn't happen as well. Mistakes made.
No, corporate raiders did not kill O'day. O'day died (just like C&C and Cal and Islander, and S2 and ...) because they did not see or could not adjust to the huge change in the market caused by changes in American recreational interest.
