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Very low demand may be driving down prices.

Yes, that E-3 issue is quite common. It is a design fault, not just a simple QA issue. It is so common in fact that I took preventive action when I obtained the E-3 I have now. Remove the 2 screws that cause the problem, very carefully open the frame slightly, apply a very tiny bit of high-grade glue at strategic points, close the frame again, and put the screws back in place. The trick here is to reduce the load on those 2 screws, while not increasing the load on other parts of the frame too much.

The display issue seems more like a quality issue to me, but I didn’t take apart an E-M5 display yet, so it might also be a design flaw (as it is with the E-3).

There are actually a number of common QA issues, one of which is somewhat interesting.
- paint pealing off (seems fixed or at least less of an issue with more recently produced cameras)
- IBIS misbehaving. I currently have an E-M5 where IBIS goes totally nuts whenever focal length is exactly 300mm (either set in the IS panel, or due to zooming to 300mm).
- sensor connections seemingly failing or being subject to heavy interference.
- de-lamination of layers of the sensor causing excessive chroma noise and stuck pixels, sometimes limited to a small area, but at times covering the most or the entire sensor. This especially shows at ISO 800 and up as a sort of yellowish patina that seems to cover parts the image as if someone had been covering it with a bit of ‘ear wax’, and lower intensity (then the yellow patina) greenish and red discoloring of darker areas of the picture.

The de-lamination issue is interesting because the exact same issue with the exact same way of manifesting itself also occurred with some early production models of the Nikon D800. This seems to be a QA issue at the sensor plant and does suggest both the E-M5 and D800 use sensors that are very closely related with regards to production process. This issue seems solved now, but was not uncommon with early production models.

Are those issues very common? From what I can tell no, but they most definitely are there.

For what its worth, every consumer product has some QA issues, especially shortly after introduction. The question is usually not if issues exist, but how often they occur and how they are being dealt with when they occur.

The local shops I have a lot of contact with report that Olympus fixes the issues without making any fuzz, often just replacing the camera. They do complain about the turnaround times for those repairs however. Also, they report that it is a relatively small fraction of the cameras that seems affected, not much different from cameras from other brands.