This winter I had an in ground pool built with a 1000 sqft stamped concrete deck. Initially the stamped concrete looked a little off, but pretty good overall. Then I noticed some pulling up (small peaks in the surface) as if it was stamped while the concrete was too wet. But the defects didn't appear too bad and the color looked good. It was supposed to a Bone color in a random stone pattern.

Here's a picture of the sample in front of the pool company office. It's the same color that I selected and a similar pattern.

This picture below is what my deck initially looked like.

Here's what it looks like now where it's exposed to weather 2 months after it was installed.

It looks like the top layer of material has washed off along with the color and the detailed finished.

The concrete sub contractor came out after I complained and initially said the concrete was too wet, then recently changed his tune. He says it looks good. To address some of the roughness in the recessed stamped area he sent out his crew to hand sand it. I though that would be detailed sanding of the rough spots. I was horrified to see them out there going to town with a handheld belt sander. That just took more detail off and didn't touch the roughness in the low spots. To be clear the fading color and washed out look showed up in advance of the sanding.

The pool company says it looks fine. They've offered to seal it because that should fix it. I went ahead and paid them because initially it looked a lot better and several people told me that it needed to weather bit for the final look.

I don't want an overlay and I don't see how this can be fixed with out tearing it out and starting over. I really don't want to be in court suing the pool company, but that appears to be the most likely course of action.

Has anyone seen concrete stamping like this? Any practical experience fixing something like this?