You wrote: ... is a bit of a knob not to carry some basic spares such as a clutch cable and a countershaft sprocket...

Carrying just a countershaft sprocket doesn't help me much as the rear sprocket is pretty much unique to the XT too. The last Yamaha imported into the USA/Canada using that sprocket was in 1998 and not a sales success...
If you don't suggest I carry a chain then I'll have to go to a bike shop for that anyway, wouldn't it be more logical to get the sprockets there too? It was Yamaha's attitude towards a customer that was/is the problem here.

On a more positive note: I was at a Yamaha dealer in Bucharest recently. We had just been told the quality problems at Yamaha had improved a lot since 2010. His reply was 'Oh, really?'