At some point when you see "hey, if they actually stick to everything they promise, i literally cannot lose money in 99.99% of situations and will make massive profit" you are supposed to realize you are being scammed and dealing with liars who will fuck you over
Except that wasn't the deal here. If the BJ's had shipped on time assuming a 2%/day hashrate increase they would have been a 10% loss before accounting for the MPP, the MPP was only a correction back up to break evenish. Actual hashrate growth since the batch 1 orders happened and now has been much greater— more like 2.3%/day. You could say that the BJs had a reasonable potential for some upside if delivered on time and to spec, but massive profit? No way. They wouldn't have made a massive profit if they were delivered to spec.
Thats what was crappy here... the prices were high, the projected revenue wasn't great. The _only_ thing the HF batch 1 offer had going for it was a layered stack of assurances that it was reasonably unrisky— refunds, mpp, (near)state of the art process, an experienced design house, located in silicon valley, a late announcement with near impending shipping (they initially seemed to be saying they weren't going to take preorders, but ultimately they did). I think this contributes to people not being happy about the current situation: We weren't promised unicorns and rainbows and so didn't expect the risks that comes with chasing them.
Though I suppose some customers used crazy optimistic hashrate projections and thought they were going to make a mint... though I don't understand why anyone doing that hadn't already sunk their money on KNC.
It certainly wasn't the case for everyone. I saw it as a moderately low risk way that I could upgrade my mining farm to 28nm and continue mining as increased hashrates drove my avalons into non-profitability over power costs... and now they're asking people to lock in an 86% loss. ... perhaps even trying to force it, if that unsolicited refund check wasn't a one off fluke. (Easy for people to jump to that conclusion, since there is still a fighting chance that batch 1 + full MPP will be somewhat less of a loss than taking that refund check; assuming hope upon hope that this time the delivery timeframes are correct)
