It's amazing how powerful perception and reputation can be. In the UK the CUT and SCUT markets are tiny - basically golf courses and stately homes for mowing / maintenance, and then smallholdings or estates for more varied work and that's about it. As a result there simply was no market for many years, and even now they're relatively rare beasts compared to agri machines.
In the early days, the only Kubotas were all grey imports and had a shocking reputation, and the small end of the market was sown up by Ford / Iseki / Massey. Now the tables have turned and Kubota have about half the market, but whilst the dealers trumpet their capabilities, and estates still buy them for mowing, the farming and agri community (along with smallholders and estates) continue to despise them - hence why there are still massive numbers of Massey / JD / NH compacts (and they sell well, and are cheaper than Kubota too) which all have a sterling reputation.
The general opinion seems to be that if you want something that looks showy and pretty whilst tidying the verges around the 18th green, you go orange. If you need a workhorse to tackle anything heftier, do loading or backhoe work and so on, you get a "proper" CUT. I was talking to the engineer at my local agri place who services my Massey the other day, and he commented that he was so relieved I didn't get the Kubota I'd been looking at - he had 3 in the workshops at the time, all out of commission for lack of parts supply or bits that kept breaking - now that cannot be representative of the capabilities of Kubota, but it does say a lot about their general reputation around these parts, coupled to the incapbilities of Kubota UK themselves.
Also, it's notable that all the Kubota dealers are in towns / cities, whereas he Massey / NH / JD and so on are well out in the countryside - IE where the work is.
Reputations are dangerous things, and can be made or broken on the simplest of things.
