You'll probably tell me to get my tinfoil hat on, but I've always thought that the Hubble was intentionally flawed when it was launched. It was just too convenient that NASA was able to so easily come up with a fix that just happened to require a spacewalk to fix, this coming at a time when NASA was beginning to be seen as irrelevant and unnecessary. Suddenly, NASA was able to prove that they could repair a massive telescope in space! Too much coincidence for me.
Yeah, how could they fail to test the curvature of the mirror on the ground? Boggles the imagination...