>>6341211Bandai's plamo factories are (nearly) all in Japan, a fact that they proudly promote themselves with as it means they have to achieve higher quality standards than china or similarly based factories are restricted to.
One of gunpla's biggest selling points is how comparatively inexpensive it is. One of the key ways they achieve this low cost is the high amount of automation in their factories, utalizing things like robotic fork lifts to carry out most tasks a human would be required for.
Prepainted parts requires hiring human laborers typically, especially if you want any sort of precision or detail. Hiring and paying these people costs you more money and continues to cost you money as long as you're producing the kits, which in bandai's case could easily be decades. This all raises the cost of the kit as well.
Bandai would rather instead invest in things like creative part separation, multi-colored layered runners, and stickers/decals that can simply be produced from their automated factories that don't require hiring some guys specificly to do.
To my knowledge the only modern line that required laborers like this to be hired was the System Weapon line that had precut and pre assembled parts. They actually moved production of that line to a third world country to keep the costs down.
