Since the manufacturers are making the money I think it's only a matter of time before group buys turn into crowd funding to start their own ASIC productions.
That is laughable. If you think the motley mess of scammers and incompetence of the current round of ASIC manufacturers is high, crowdfunded attempts will bet that 10 fold. Most crowdfunded projects end up barely breaking even or a failure with only a shoddy product as a result. Sure there are good ones but that comes from sharp management. If management was that sharp they would have just went straight for preorder.
When scrypt coins collapse because of the KNCminers released all those ASICs will be absolutely useless. People will be cutting their loses hoping to sell their miners to a sucker on ebay for a fifth of what they bought it at because they are not even making their electricity bill. Most of the manufacturer orders will dry up and if they are lucky to have made back their NRE they will be fire selling their miners in order to cover overhead and expenses. Most will go bankrupt and any orders in the queues will be wiped out.
What is different this time from the ASIC run on BTC is that this time there is a lot more money being pulled into ASICs for a lot less profit. There was a fall in BTC prices when ASICs started coming out and there was a sell of or even chips being thrown away. It will be 10 times worse for Scrypt.
While I do agree that most smart people would just do a high volume ASIC purchase from the manufacturer and get their orde bumped up the chain, there is the option for somebody intelligent and ethical to lead such a crowdfunding project. See the part I bolded - you basically repeated why the current model of ordering ASIC from greedy companies is silly. You're guaranteed to hand the profits to them. At least if it's a decently controlled design it may not be profitable but you would be part of the project and not subsidizing somebody elses retirement plan.
