Well, as it appears to me, there is a few "tattle-tales" going on here.
First, it should be known that I used to work for a machine shop here in the Denver, CO area. This shop wasn't necessarily a performance shop per say, as the specialty of this shop was more or less stock rebuilding and installation of fairly common engines in fairly common vehicles. We weren't particularly into rotaries for instance, or old MG's or Alfa Romeo's or similar. We did build just about any American made or Japanese made engine though, and built a few stroker 4G's while I was there.
That being said, most shops clean aluminum heads by sand blasting. Your head looks too shiny to have been sand blasted. Also, there is evidence of gasket material still left around the exhaust ports and the valvecover seal area and the spark plug tube seal areas. If the head was blasted, this wouldn't be evident. Aside from that, most shops don't have the equipment to align hone cam journals. The hones are simply too small, and used so infrequently, to realistically be profitable for most shops. This is different though if you are a nationwide company, such as Jasper Engines, because, for one, you ship everything everywhere and keep stock of everything (so you only have to have one machine to serve the whole country, and can do 40 identical heads in a row, which saves time and money), and for two, the warranty process only covers so much of the actual cost of replacement (so if they sell a fucked up head, the customer usually still has to cover fluids and gaskets and head bolts and the like), so it actually costs the reman company less to chance a questionable core than it does to scrap the same core. Most of the time, most folks will throw the car on craigslist or into the scrapyard than try and fix it twice. These companies (the big, nationwide remanufucturers) usually only have to account for approximately 1/4 or less of their f***-ups. It is kind of a win- win for them actually, because the vast majority of the consumers can't prove anything was ever wrong to begin with. Also, why are the studs missing on the cam sensor boss and the coolant outlet boss? There isn't really any reason to remove those. These things all point to a head that came from a company that doesn't really care what the end consumer has to endure to actually use the said product.
These companies definitely ARE NOT casting their own heads. That would be too expensive. Look up a set of AFR heads for a 1996 LT1 350 chevy. Then call any machine shop and tell them that you want a set of the same (but original, factory) rebuilt, and the cost difference will be WELL over 1000 bucks. Gauranfawkinteed. That is because AFR (and the like) actually do cast their own versions of said heads. To my knowledge, no one needs to make their own version of the DOHC 4G head, because, despite their inconsistencies, Mitsubishi's design can't really be improved upon.
So I guess, the real question is what do you do? My suggestion is that you let another shop look at that head. THOROUGHLY. And then go from there.
