First of all, Rama gets a big point in my book for disassociating with massdrop.
- "Everyone's had issues, everyone will have issues": Yes, if you are referring to every project encountering problems. That is how the world works, and that will never change. It's how those problems are solved, and how the project as a whole is run that counts.
- RAMA absolutely cannot produce his designs without help, in one form or another. We all need help. Collaboration is integral to success (/corporate speak).
You know, Vigrith, it's a tough problem, really it is. How do you select a reliable production team? It's very hard. Frankly I'm not even sure how I would approach the problem.
Our problem is the same as that of everyone else, we want to produce high quality goods cheaply and quickly. A key difference is that we don't have a big industry, or market, backing us.
And it is such.a.tough.problem. But if we want our keyboard world to be as good as it can be, we need to start imitating industry as much as we can. And we are trying to do that already, I know, with some success even.
But one of the key things is to truly run a project with a collaborative team. Something is wrong if we can say "oh he was just the designer, don't blame things on him" or "don't blame the leadership, the factory got it wrong." It means there are rifts and cracks within the team that must be closed. Every part of the group should not only care about, but have a stake in, how the project as a whole is performing.
You said it yourself, and I can't imagine anyone disagrees with the assessment that pretty much every group buy ever run has encountered serious problems. Well you know what? That's excellent, because we can learn from those problems. It means we have a wealth of information which we can use to course correct our future projects.
Fundamentally, we need to examine all the problems that have occurred in past group buys, and avoid them in the future.
Otherwise, what are we doing? We are just doing the same thing and expecting a different result, hoping for excellence by sheer probability. That approach is not sustainable and has no future.
For the record, I am not suggesting a universal, complete, and effective solution. What we as the keyboard community try to do is exceptionally difficult, and I do not know what the perfect path is and I assure you that if I somehow assumed leadership of the entire community I would make more mistakes on the first day than you could count on all your fingers and toes.
But, I've made my suggestion: Determine what's gone wrong, and don't repeat the mistakes.
As for RAMA, there is simply no going back from the reputation damage done by this project. That's not to say he couldn't repair his reputation, but the damage is done. And I will say it again, this is simply because his name attached to a project is no guarantee it will go, I don't know, smoothly I guess, as evinced specifically by the Exent. I was previously operating under the impression that his name meant something, and now I've seen that it does not, and that's the end of it. Plain and simple.