Of course -- and Airbus spent billions to avoid the tech issues. Much of that spending bore fruit, some did not. The "systemic" failure is that the attempt to prevent failures by predicting them before they happen (done with a combination of extra sensors and software) has actually resulted in "false alarm" tech faults; ie. the aircraft going tech when it could have safely operated that flight and gone tech in the after-flight inspection or prep for the next flight. Easily fixed in software, so this will improve dramatically over the next year. Some of the other failures are more interesting (unanticipated harmonic vibration in the high-pressure hydraulic lines that only occurs under full load and wasn't predicted by the engineering software). Somewhat interesting given all the attention that has been placed on hydraulics since the DC-10 fiascos.

I did learn that Airbus has guaranteed 98.5% tech dispatch rate over n years of service (n varies by airline, whatever they negotiated), so if it stays at 97% or even rises to 98% Airbus will be paying billions in performance penalties (or QF will get a fleet of A350s for free).

Overall the A380 is a great plane and success, but there are interesting problems which continue at the 2 year mark. Presumably the 787 is avoiding some of these; we'll see.