I don’t actually think this Kickstarter is going that badly in all honesty. There was one serious issue which was the shipping cost debacle, and then the whole communications situation. As for actual time frames, considering the estimate was initially June/July 2024 its shocking close to being on schedule, which I think is impressive for such a large and complex project.

There’s a high portion on new to Kickstarter backers on this, I think 25%  iirc along with what appears to be a lot of scarily invested backers, especially in the US. I think I lot of those have been rather vocal about the “delays”, which if you knew you would treat those “estimates” as exactly that, a rough timeframe.

Regarding the communications it has been very very rocky this last year, seemingly forgetting the rest of world existed would seem a pretty big balls up, but I don’t think it was intentional. I think their expectation was to start shipping roughly at the same time for everyone, which was why items had already been shipped to international hubs in advance. There where obviously some longer customs delays than perhaps expected (to be fair we’ve had same at work as EU customs just seems to be hammered this year), the last few months is a pretty big own goal though, and i think caused a lot of frustration. First we got the announcement RoW was delayed, without clear info. Once shortages where identified, they then took over a month to address the actions to correct them and inform us, jetting off to a con and leaving them over a month isnt a great look, along with the key person dependency apparently on signing off any Comms from CGL’s side, in addition to needing QML comms sign off.

I actually thought the last update above was very well done, and to the standard I would expect, I would have been nice to have a vague estimate when our RoW shipping commences but overall I was happy with it. I wasnt happy it took so long to appear, and I was less happy it appeared several days after it was promise the same day (due to mentioned sign offs) but it was pretty clear and concise.