Applying Hanlon's razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") to the Hashfast meltdown, lately I've been wondering if their ridiculous recent announcement of wanting to become the Intel of bitcoin mining might not have been the belated revelation of management's plan all along. That they would sell boxes long enough to get a foothold, and then transform themselves, as silly as it sounds today, into a chipmaking firm, on the basis of the performance of their chip.
This might explain the lack of attention paid to the "substrate", and the order of thousands more chips than they seem to have immediately needed. (I know there are economies of scale on the chips, but there are on other things too.) They were, from the beginning, in the box business only temporarily, since Simon thought he had the chip thing figured out. The sometimes irrational emphasis on "high quality" long lasting components, etc, was related to the branding effort in the long term.
In order to implement their plan, they got money from where they could, which turned out to be the waterboarding porn crowd, who inserted Johnny Scrotum as their man on the scene to watch over the investment (since, through insertions prior, he could be relied upon in, err, insertions). But I digress....
In return for their money, the pron crowd demanded immediate compensation in the form of a lot of bitcoins from the initial orders. Eddie and Simon might not have been able to resist a little pillaging either. But, Eddie figured, as long as they could nail the chips and have enough money to start shipping boxes, they'd be okay, since the equipment would be good, and he'd then quickly have the means to transform Hashfast into boutique mining chip maker, par excellence. But when things started unravelling in late 2013, the obligation to the pron crowd tied Eddie's hands, making a change of plan impossible, because he was locked into paying the pronsters back a percentage of X initial units (or X bitcoins). And they probably didn't care much if Hashfast failed, they were just earning a nice percentage on preorders.
Focused on the chip and paying the pron guys, as Amy said, Hashfast "never really recovered" from that failed first board. Once the pron people had been paid, there wasn't much money left (and Scrotum could leave, his job done). Eddie and Simon got left holding a lot of chips AND the obligation to deliver to customers, and not much capital. Fixing the board heavily strained their limited finances, after paying off torture porn mob. They got stuck.
Unwilling to give up on the plan, however, in early 2014, Eddie was paralyzed. Filling the orders wasn't the priority. A path to chipmaker status was. So they tried to drip the orders out enough to hold the wolves (customers) at bay, while still searching for that deal to transform themselves into "Intel", which obviously required holding a lot of chips in hand, since there was no money to make more. Even worse, the lawsuits were causing their remaining nestegg to hemorrhage, requiring the attempt to drum up sales of the "Yoli". But Eddie still chose to avoid reconciliation with an angry mob of customers, holding out hope of reeling in the big deal.
The rising sentiment against them, and competition, scared away any serious partner to manufacture and retail the boxes, and eroded the terms that Eddie could secure from those still willing to take a chance, and so the drain circling slowly accelerated...
Which leads to the present situation.
Just a theory.