No one responded who had their focus problems fixed to their satisfaction, so I'm going to re-post my question in another post, since this got off topic here. (and please let there be people who had their faulty focus fixed!)

Btw, its really simple to detect the focus problem - you focus, shoot and then you look. All of us Nikonians have developed that skill (to see if something is in focus) quite well. I got 1/30 correct focus on the left side, 29/30 in the middle, and 12/30 on the right side. Its even detectable on the camera in playback.