I have not bought yet but did a lot of comparison before I decided to go with 3dr. I luckily enough have not laid out any cash that will lock me into one venue or the other yet. It is still my intention to do 3dr in the long run, but for now ????
I am in a quandary. I also know how they feel , more or less.
Not everything is in their court to know until it happens.. I don't think anyone really believes they intentionally give us a bad delivery date, I think they are hoping that this round of efforts will be on time and the product will be usable. They can't know that, until it is finished. Production and shipping can happen incredibly quickly once the QC trigger is pulled. I suspect that production of many components are at 100% waiting for a single small subassembly, bit of code etc.
I am the root source of at least two major manufacturers similar woes right now. They ask me when I will be finished and I tell them it should be about "x" days and we will present to them for inspection. And then it happens again. I lose another 2 days production get one good day in and lose a couple more,,,,,, completely out of my control and it cannot be predicted.
I have a shop doing 3d cnc work, pattern-making and more often than not I am involved with a product development workflow. 2 months ago my business got struck directly by lightning, literally. I had several time sensitive projects underway. Everything in my life/business is computer controlled and/or produced. I do a lot of 3d laser scanning and cnc cutting. I can tell you first hand UPS's do not have much protection for a lightning strike.
If my building would have burned down it would have been a blessing compared to the slow business death I have endured. The migrant electrical traffic did not explode or burn up much tech stuff as you would expect. It instead just burnt it a bit so that it would fail very soon. I have now lost over $30k in controllers and inverters in my main cnc machine, One at a time !
Every single PC in my shop and office have now lost motherboards or major components. Every single problem has stopped production for a few days at least, but now I am a full month back on my promises and it is my clients, not me that have been making promises based on my latest best guess of delivery. They all know me and know I am doing everything I can, but they have passed dates for new product releases at once a year trade shows, they have not shipped component prototypes to manufacturers because I have not finished them yet. And the retail customers I am sure are having the same discussions we have about the "choices" 3dr has been making. I have to think that no one would run this route by choice.
I may buy a phantom this week to finish a large scale scanning project that is waiting for me to get my larger jobs delivered (they should be done in about 2 more days,,, I hope! ).
In the end 3dr will still get my serious money because of the malleability of the system. I am putting a lightweight lidar scanner on it soon and it will be much easier to do on the 3dr. I am also adapting a FLIR type unit on it. I am at the point now where my budget is almost zero due to repairing all my failing equipment.
I wish things had gone better for everyone including 3dr and all the unhappy customers. Hopefully the gimbal will be to spec this round and we can all start playing as we thought we could earlier.
Tight lines, Phill
