I agree, it was hard to beat that 580 motor in '93 and '94. I do not agree that '95 was the worst. I thought the crank issues were with the '96 and '97s, but I am not sure. My brother and I both have '95 XLT Specials nearing 10,000 miles each.
I am not sure how dodger knows that Polaris lost their quality control.
I do not know of any "recalls" on the XTRA-12. There were updates, though. Whenever I hear somebody say the 12s are tippy, I just have to jump in and say something. Properly set up, the XTRA-12 is not tippy. Ride height should be really no higher than a standard machine. The problem was when the 12 came out, nobody knew how to set them up. Everybody was used to riding the old, crappy, uncoupled suspensions of the day. The only adjustment anybody ever made to the old suspensions was changing the preload on the torsion springs. Well, that just doesn't cut it with the 12. So maybe the "recalls" dodger remembers were actually just people running back to the dealer crying that they could not get their 12 set up properly. And, as always, Polaris probably didn't educate all the dealers exceptionally well, or get the updates down the line very fast. And I cannot blame people for faulting Polaris for that. But, in turn, a lot of people blamed the sled, which is wrong.
Dodger, I hope you do not take offense. My post is not meant as an attack. I just wanted to make a point.