It is pretty confusing a'ite. Tohatsu used to make all Merc, Yammie and Nissan motors up to varying degrees, but pretty much all motors of any size are made by that brand - their flagship engines. Nissan and Tohatsu are still the same. Yammie switched to all in house mfg. Not sure about Merc. Guessing Bombardier (OMC, Johnson, Evinrude) are all in house too, but doubt their 2 stroke small motors are.

Oh, and your mechanic is right. Ficht was the worst EVAH. That said, you'll find folks like Triton who's been running the dog snot out of 'em for years with no problems whatsoever. Matter of fact, never walked up on anybody with a FICHT who's run it for any length of time who had a bad thing to say about them. Then again, there are many, many, many stories of repeated failures and rebuilds from back in the day of motors that made folks go broke. Know of a couple who had theirs rebuilt up to 5 times under warranty and got so sick of down time, they basically wrote it off and bought another motor and took basically a total loss on them through trade.

Wannabe...