Dear God, Llyod. It's not the difficulty of the trail, it's the composition of the slick rock. Grippy surface meets spinning tire mass should = lots of breakage according to you. There were quite a few 2nd gen's there (I don't have a total for you) and this was a front the blew up not a rear. But by your logic, every single 2nd gen with anything over stock size tire should have had a rear diff failure on the WAY to Moab and if they were lucky enough to get there unscathed then they surely should have failed simply because there is better traction on slickrock than most metropolitan roads.

I agree that the front diff was designed poorly, as for the rear I don't agree with you at all. I would not be shocked to find out that Nissan received a bad batch of one of the components of the rear end.