You are talking to and about the kind of people who read these forums.
I am talking about the customers who buy the gadgets/appliances/whatever that have the FTDI chips in them. They have no clue what FTDI is, they just follow the instructions about plugging in the USB cable. And if it doesn't work then they are on the phone for customer support. They don't know what a driver is or what it does, they just follow the installation instructions and execute the batch file.
You seem to have an extremely narrow view of the world and who the real FTDI users are. This debacle will likely put at least a few small companies out of business because FTDI bricked all their products and now they are trying to fight a forest fire. You appear to have a real blind spot for the broader view of where and how FTDI chips are used out in the Real World.
I am currently working on a product that will use a USB interface for one version. I feel fortunate that this happened before I committed to which solution to select. It will certainly not be FTDI.
People read forums in general, people read twitter, people use facebook, people talk to people, and tons and tons of people use google search. (It isn't just tech people that do this anymore it is far more mainstream than you seem to be implying)
People are not like a robots where in a robot it is actually dumb if you don't tell it exactly what to do it will do absolutely nothing (at best) forever.
Your going to get into a circular loop your view is also extremely narrow in that people are helpless and totally clueless and can't type into google or read text that clearly says what to do. Plus how many people use the "phone" any more most modern phones don't do phone very well, my nexus 4 had the happy the program crashed message in the middle of a call and I was like this is the world of apps. In any case the end result is explained in a nice example below. And if they did phone FTDI as microsoft suggested they would then probably go onto twitter getting angry at FTDI which would probably be a valid response because FTDI probably wouldn't help them at all and would probably suggest that the caller is at fault for having a fake part.
Also if you assume people are very clueless then they will be so clueless that they would have long lost the manual and contact info (Who reads that anyways) and just stare and listen to exactly what windows and since it says contact FT232R they say ok google what FT232R and contact FTDI instead of mfg because they forgot and just act like robots listening to whatever is right in front of them is telling them.
A good company like sparkfun will literally post our 1st party boards contain real parts and we are checking 3rd party ones now. A bad company is like FTDI sucks (They do but that isn't going to help a end user).
A small company that dies because
all their products contains fakes is not the subject of this thread which his about FTDI being mean/evil to end users. They should have sourced real parts and done proper quality control checks and verified that parts sent from reputable sources physically match the ones they are shipping (the fakes are not even identical on the outer case). Some level of technical competence is required to be a successful small business and if they lack the ability to do so then yes they may die but others won't. You seem to have a very odd view of corporate failure to detect fakes being the same level as end users being able to detect fakes, I do not expect everyone to be able to detect fakes but companies (academic/tiny/small/med/large) in the business of making electronics should be able to detect fakes on a basic level at least. (In our system we could even detect if a student substituted a fake on a loaned board it would be very visibly obvious when you have a couple hundred good ones around it)
You are free to use whatever company you want in your designs I am planning on single chip for one project with integrated USB because it needs to be very compact and robust for both dumb and hostile users scopes. Our older designs use FTDI chips and we have a large stock of them sitting around so they will keep using it as well for the foreseeable future because I'm 100% sure the chips are real.
Here is an easy example for a end user that doesn't know FTDI exists or what an FT232R is,
User plugs in device which they did not know had a fake FTDI device to their windows machine and they get a pop-up saying it doesn't work. They are like oh what is going on here (No they probably do not sit there in shock and stare at the screen with a dull blank gaze as if their entire world was upturned by a little innocuous text bubble until the medical professionals come in and preform an emergency brain restart) they think hey this was working just last week. They click on the big inviting bubble that says click for more information and the see. No driver found for FT232R contact the manufacturer for support. Since they are lazy go onto google and ask "What is FT232R". (They get a nice big description and go oh what the hell is that supposed to do, and see FTDI is the maker.) Then since they are also posting on twitter they look FTDI up there they get all the juicy details and or are the start of the social media viral storm and they enjoy it, they savor it, it drives them, etc... . Later people make youtube videos, countless forum posts, picture guides, point to official guides that do the same thing, rants, facebook it, spread the word around. And FTDI backtracks and the user is now hey wait I still have a fake here hmmm I want a refund no I demand a refund.
And it bears repeating that I do think FTDI is being mean/evil with PID altering and it looks to me very much like HDCP magic which I hate with a passion but FTDI does have the rights to stop the device from working with the driver so long as they do not alter the PID to make it non-plug and play. To an end user this is the same end result the device will no longer work. (A small business that failed to detect fakes may suffer as a result but this is why counterfeiting is bad and some level of detecting fake/scams is required more so for SMB as they can't weather any failures like all our devices are fake vs. a large company that can say only a tiny fraction of our devices are affected and so on)