OK - here is the bottom line on the Zeus equipment
For full disclosure: I started with a week 1 GAW Fury (same thing as a Zeus Blizzard except that mine actually shipped on time), now own 11 of them and a Black Widow (the GAW 62 chip one). I like GAW, they do their best to delivery, and I'm an affiliate of theirs. OK, think that covers that. The rest of what I'm saying comes under the disclosure of "To the best of my knowledge".
1) Terry (aka Panda) over at Zeus promised delivery dates and full software support for his product line.
2) Luke and Nate and others hear about the new chipset and ask for samples and specs in order to develop drivers - nothing happens
3) Equipment arrives at the distributors with software for one specific mining device. Shipments are due to go out in days. Most users don't have such a device. Raspberry PIs are somewhat kinda cheap, lets use those. Distributors panic and hack together cgminer 3.1.1 and make emergency alliances with others, like Zenminer. And believe me, cgminer 3.1.1 for Zeus is a total hack: No attempt to identify chips - just presume everything attached is a Zeus and that they are all the same.
4) Others start the long process of reverse engineering 3.1.1 and trying to figure out how to do it right. Many are partially successful using equipment they bought themselves. Note this is mostly all volunteer efforts - people spending their weekends and evening trying to make the world a little better - much like Luke and Nate. Thus we end up with DarkWinde's efforts and several others. I believe Starminer sponsors DMAXL to try and get it right - probably the first guy to actually receive payment for this efforts.
5) Nate finally, about 5 weeks after first ships, gets a single low end Blizzard to test against. Prior to this, he has looked at a few volunteers systems (like mine) to try and get a grasp on whats going on.
6) Nate - who is the responsible party for All-Things-Scrypt within bfgminer's codebase gets to work, burning more of his weekends and evenings (fact: been online with Nate at 3am testing things - and yes, he has a regular day job!)
7) bfgminer gets fully functional code, that does detection, allows concurrent use of gridseeds, multiple Zesu devices, etc. with full command line support and integration into the code base about 6 weeks after the first equipment was available to look at.
People bitch "what took you so long!". Assholes. This is volunteer work guys. It gets done when it gets done. If you need to scream at someone, go scream at Terry for not delivering specs, ever, or early test units to the community, and instead focusing on maximizing HIS profits.
Cassey