You're right, it sucks.
I've been to court and guess what, you mostly lose money and time, on the oft chance that once you get what you lost back. But mostly, you just lose time and money.
A class action would be something different, but that would only be for revenge's sake as you will probably not see a penny/satoshi.
This. If you haven't been through it, you don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes. And its one expensive hole leading to a guaranteed loss. IANAL and this isn't advice, but here is how I see it:
After 3 years of paying lawyers at say 2.5 BTC an hour, you would get to watch all your claims slowly fall apart. You aren't just paying for a trial, you are paying for choosing the venue, precedence research, discovery, depositions, affidavits, expert witnesses, smaller issues with magistrates judges, settlement negotiations, and any other number of seemingly unrelated items.
With that in mind:
Breach of contract requires Avalon acting in bad faith. That's too a high bar to hit if they shipped any chips at all. Which they have.
You'd have to prove that the group buy customers had no reasonable expectation that there was the possibility of a loss. You'd have to prove that somehow, we were misled and unaware of the risks in making the purchase and that Avalon misrepresented those risks. Which you can't.
The time based loss is actually because of customs and isn't covered in the contract. You can't claim tortious interference by customs, which is actually the tort that applies IMHO. It's their job to stop things and inspect them coming into the country.
Measuring damages means a numerical analysis of what is lost to make you whole. If you get your boards at all anytime soon, your damage is zero in the written context of the agreement. I can't stress that enough: ZERO.
If you can magically persuade a court that you are owed damages on the time based loss, then you have to do the math on that too. That loss is not the emotional zero people are claiming. Its the expected value of running the miner for the intended amount of time and it will be measured in dollars. This loss is smaller than you'd expect.
So do whatever you want, but legal action is the single worst idea I've seen in this thread so far. Negotiating some remedy with Avalon actually has a non-zero chance of yielding results. Legal action only gets you further in the hole.