I have a feeling "Nick Nicholas" is a certain user by another name on several other forums who's made it his life's work to relentlessly disparage 3DR at every opportunity. Would not surprise me at all if he's on DJI's payroll, just as we saw a few years ago Samsung paying people to disparage HTC online. Takes all kinds...
In any case, is this all concerning? Sure. 3DR is obviously going through some business model issues. Solo probably hasn't sold as well as they hoped. The FAA regulations have cast a bit of a shadow over the industry, and the general hype surrounding "drones" has died down considerably. Solo is a great product that still offers more capabilities than the competition and I hope it and 3DR have a future.
Regarding support, people in general have an unfortunate tenancy to ruin things for themselves. Give people unlimited mobile data on a smartphone plan, and they'll use it to replace their non-mobile home internet access and stream terabytes of netflix and youtube. Give people unlimited cloud storage, and they'll upload petabytes of garbage, just because they can. Give people a liberal replacement policy, and you'll have them destroying their product through sheer stupidity and demanding a replacement. Give people a 24/7 call center, and you'll have non-customers calling in just to chat.
So telephone support is/may be going away. If that helps 3DR weather the storm, fine. Personally, I preferred e-mail support anyway, it let me organize needed information better, attach images, send links to videos detailing the issue, etc. An issue with my drone is not a life and death situation, I don't need someone manning a phone 24 hours a day to handle whatever problem I may run into.
Regarding the confusion surrounding the battery sale, I'm sorry if this offends some people here, but seriously??!?!? I added one battery, proceeded through the checkout process to the page that lets you enter coupon codes, which
always comes
before entering in your payment info. Nothing happened, so I figured I needed to add two batteries, which then enabled the coupon code to do it's thing. If you couldn't figure that out, maybe you shouldn't be flying a 4lb RC aircraft through the skies.