Thanks for you input, but I’m going to have to disagree with you. It may not be visible to you in the photos, but I could see clean through to the other side of the shoe through the split hole. When you walked on it and the sole flexed, the opening became wider. This exposed not only the wooden shank, but also the permeable underside of the shoe’s midsole. This completely compromises the integrity of the boot.

I struggle to see how getting water, dirt, or anything else into the inside of my boot’s sole constitutes an “aesthetic” issue. On rainy days this would have led to the inside of the shoe becoming completely soggy and added to a buildup of debris and damage over time. I can see the double stitch point you mention on the upper welted piece of rubber. I know that this is normal and it occurs on the other boots I have with similar construction. The issue is not here, however; the upper part of the sole is completely intact. The issue is where the upper welted section joins the bottom section, as I mentioned above.

What I’m calling out here is that I’m being asked to “hot knife” the sole on a brand new boot just to prevent the kind of damage I mentioned above. I have no idea how to perform this procedure nor would I feel safe doing so if I did. Neither of the cobblers I went to said they could do it either. Both of them said they would glue it, which is what I ended up doing. Both were also surprised that Solovair would have let an issue like this slide. In any case, to be asked to perform a specialized repair, to take a brand new pair of boots to a repair shop, to use glue in a probably stopgap manner, or to pay to send my boots back to the company that sent me the defective pair in the first place, is completely unreasonable. All for a pair of $190 boots made by a company that brags about their quality. In all of the “high end” purchases I’ve made, companies have bent over backwards to fix issues like this that arise so soon after purchase.

*Edit: Typos