Josh has actually explained BFL's reasoning on doing it this way. Essentially, it's that the people who ordered in the first two months are being compensated for not having their units before the block reward halved. He maintains that customers who ordered later will be no more disadvantaged than they would have been had BFL delivered on time (because the block reward would have halved by the time they got their units and difficulty would have increased after the shipping of the first batch of orders anyway).
I read their reasoning, it still makes little sense, later customers were screwed just as much.
How are later customers not effected by BFL delaying 4 months? They would have had their ASIC already if they started shipping in October like they were supposed to. Because of their mistakes, there will now be hundreds of Avalon ASICs released before later customers even get their ASIC, thus increasing difficulty and costing them each money (maybe about 2 months of avalon-free network profits.)
EDIT: You guys are first two month order holders, making you biased. I on the other hand have no orders from BFL at the moment. If I was a later BFL customer I would be pissed.
Were you ordering in the confusion on day 1? No? So you didn't understand the frenzy and worry that people had. Everybody moved their $ into BTC so they could pay. I didn't even bother to fuck around with Dwolla/MtGox which was having 1 month delays at some point. I just paid a flat 209 BTC for an SC Single - which now is the equivalent of $25x208 - that's over $5k. Sure many say you count the hedge, but at that time BTC was the only payment they said they would take on day #1. After a couple days people were able to pay with wire payments but even that was confusing as to whether payment date or order date would count as purchase time.
I tried to get into the clusterfuck that was Avalon both times and failed.
Why not complain about those who mined thousands of coins with CPUs back in the day...
