Is the price right? Yes. Does the J/GH ratio still sucks? Absolutely. Does trusting them with a 20-days preorder window sucks as well? Yes.

The chips have been on sale for months. However they are quite useless without a board of some kind.

That makes the Hashfast bankruptcy sale 2x++ more costly than the Bitmain product! on a comparable (J/Ghs) finished product basis.  Plus, I get top notch customer service and after-sale support from Bitmaintech that would not be available form a bankrupt company.

No one ever claimed they made their own FPGA chips...

it's in Taiwan where the current run of processors is underway.

I think HF still has a bunch of Sierra rackmount cases.  Even if they don't, bare boards are much easier to put in rackmount cases than the nonstandard Bitmain chassis.

The Bitmain isn't rackmount, so no good for colo use.

The IMET case was filed sometime in May

What does bankruptcy have to do with performance specs?  Did the GN1 suddenly get slower when HF ran out of money and time?   

Finally received notice of shipment from MS last week, expecting my 5 X-3's to arrive on Monday. Supposedly they have fixed the power supply issue (yea right).

It was always disclosed, both for Eligius (for years now)

Transactions without a fee will be processed based on confidential anti-spam testing.
Transactions that seem likely to be spam may require a higher fee.

The USD:BTC rate remained bound within a historically narrow $90-$120 range for the period preceding HF taking orders.

That's one reason why nobody thought to clarify the then seemingly unlikely "what if BTC goes to $1 or $1000" scenarios.

The other reason was that common sense and contract law make it obvious that an item priced in USD will be refunded on that basis, and not on any exchange rate that never remains constant.

Whether you paid for your $6800 ASIC in Euros, USD, BTCs, or gold coins, there was never a reasonable basis to expect a refund equivalent to anything but the $6800 price.

Expectations of HF refunding any different amount, EG BTC worth $68 or $68,000, were never reasonable nor had any basis in common sense, much less contract law.

I've already repeatedly explained why the ceteris paribus interpretation is reasonable (WINDFALLS BAD; WINDFALLS NOT LEGAL) and why your greedy interpretation (WINDFALLS GOOD; GIVE ME WINDFALL) is unreasonable.

the customer support rep's response was made ceteris paribus (IE assuming the USD:BTC rate would remain constant).

Again, what is the point of minimum fee if the transaction isn't propagated? Miner-spammer includes the fee payable to himself. What's the point of that exercise?

How would you enforce those non-free transactions? If the transaction spammer is the miner then he can include any fee whatsoever because he pays himself. The only cost for him is that the coins are frozen for about 100 decaminutes.

I'll let Satoshi speak to that: 
Lets not break what needn't be broken in order to facilitate micropayments (the reason for this proposal in the first place, yes?)

Theory and practice diverge here.
A miner can put as many transactions as they like in a block with no fees.
The cost is then replicated across every full node which must store it in perpetuity.

how do you mean?

The fear is that a cartel of big, centralized, have-huge-data-pipes miners would drive out smaller miners by forcing up the block size high enough so the smaller miners have to drop out.