If you pre-order any hardware, consider it as if you are buying stock in the company, helping them raise capital, without the benefit of stock ownership to benefit from their growth.
Price of hardware needs to go down ALOT. If people stop paying the high prices for hardware that will be obsolete in 9-12 months, then the market will force the hardware suppliers to lower their prices.
The price of hardware should bear in mind the cost of predicted difficulty increase, allow miners to make ROI in 4-6 months MAXIMUM.
12 months or more for ROI on hardware that is obsolete by then is ridiculous.
+1
Absolutely agree with you.
That being said there are also other considerations you might also want to think about. We can all agree that anything available right now will be scrap metal early next year. Some new serious players (Cointerra, HashFast) are promising free extra hashrate if ROI takes too long.
Personaly i'd go for KnC or Cointerra at this point. They seem to have the proper backing making false promises and delays less likely. It's still a gamble though...
Avoid the older stuff (BFL, anything with Avalon chips, ...) it's all backordered for the next few months of production. If you didn't pay for it a while back your ROI will be "When hell freezes over"