Yep, couldn't agree more.  By the time you get your order confirmation, you are pretty much out of date.  The pre-order crap is a game that certain unsavory hardware companies play.   They take your money, build the hardware, then mine with it to "test" it.  When the hardware is finally shipping you're so far behind the difficulty curve that you will NEVER make your money back.  The hardware company ends up making all the money you were supposed to make while you're waiting for the pre-order to ship.

Anyway, 5GH for $274 is horrible.  3 AntMiner U1's from jonesgear is half that and you get more GH.  Even then, you won't make your money back ~ever~.

You're best off trying to trade alt coins with that $500.  At least with trading, you ~could~ make money off your $500.  Mining you'll never make a cent.

The more alt coins you make, the more you make BTC look unstable to "normal" people who don't understand.  Especially when you build the alt coin to be merge mined with all other alt coins and BTC.

There is no incentive for a mining hardware company to ship any of their hardware to pre-order customers after it is built, except maybe to avoid a lawsuit. 

1: They know their customers just spent all the money they had on their hardware.  So a lawsuit is going to be a far off, if ever, kind of thing.  Not that courts are fast enough to do anything about it anyway.

2: Now that the mining hardware company has a boat load of BTC income (mining) and regular old money (customer) they can drag any lawsuit out for a pretty long time at a lower cost than giving up the hardware, at least on the scale of how fast the courts move vs the difficulty.

3: If they get taken to court and lose/settle, they settle for an even refund with the customers (who are glad to just get their money back at all).  Since it was a pre-order there is shaky legal ground for any customers to get damages above refund.  Or even worse, the per-order people get their, now sadly, outdated "fully tested" hardware.


Here is how that conversation goes from the viewpoint of the mining hardware maker: "Why ship something on-time when we can "test" it for months, make a pile of BTC, and when we come up with the next step up, we ship out the "old" hardware that made us a boatload up front and during our months of "testing".  The suckers, err.. customers, won't have a leg to stand on legally if they come after us anyway, heck it'll be too late for them by the time they figure this out!".


Anyway, the difficulty ~could~ go down... but Moore's law, which might apply, suggests that will never happen with respect to hardware power in the future. 

It would take a concerted effort by all miners to keep the difficulty from going up.  If that were to happen, the guy/pool/whatever who breaks rank will be rewarded handsomely, possibly with a chance for a 51% attack.  No one else would want to see that happen, so they will all mine at full tilt no matter what.  Analogous to the concept of mutually assured destruction...