I'm not against free market, and I support everyone's right to lose their money however they deem appropriate.
However hashlets were never a true free market. Who in their right mind would pay $50 for 1 MH/s of Scrypt mining, or even $20? The only reason these products had that value was because GAW had a monopoly on them, hyped them beyond belief, and yes - lied about them. Always profitable at 1 satoshi. Zens that you mentioned are now trading at $2. Who covered $7.59 to $2 and why? Not a win-win as far as I can see.
That is the freaking definition of free market, dammit. There's a main supplier (GAW) who sets the price, and there are individuals, trading it. Besides, it was never 50$ for 1MH as far as I know - the most expensive regular Hashlet was 15$ per MH, and if you bought more, the price went down.
The market was also a place to go if you wanted cheap hashlets. Most sold around 60-70% of original price, but this of course depended on other factors.
And indeed, the Hashlets were hyped, and did not bring the level of hype. It is not a lie if you underperform because of the unaccounted circumstances. A great example would be Half-Life 3 - it is so hyped, no matter what it is when it comes out, many people will be disappointed.
Zens are trading at 2$ now, indeed. Why? Because everyone is on the Stakers now, and nobody cares about the simple mining equipment any more. Also the bad press resulted in a large amount of people breaking up their Hashlets and selling them at outrageous prices, bringing down the overall market.
Now I'm not arguing that you didn't make ROI or that you personally somehow cheated the buyers. All I'm saying is that whoever bought the hashlets from you did so while being misled by GAW as to their true value and likely lost or will lose money. In other words you making money with GAW isn't the only fact in this story, there is the ugly other side.
Even if we give GAW the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had mining power to back the hashlets (that would be where your 80% came from), there doesn't seem to be any real revenue entering the system now. Neither HashStakers nor XPY have any real value, it's all speculative based on GAW's promises, and we can see from the Zen example, or the $20 floor example, how well that works. Also facts.
It is quite interesting that you say people were misled and lost money - I'm yet to meet one who truly owned a Hashlet and lost money on it (except if re-sold it after a week, at third the price, to get rid of it fast). GAW proved multiple times that they do have the mining capacity: there were multiple pictures, non-doctored ones, showing their mining park set up in a warehouse (or was it an old airplane hangar? I can't recall, but it had a quite large internal height).
The 20$ floor is another example of GAW taking a bigger bite than they could handle. It is quite simple, if you check the exchanges - the price was indeed at 20$ initially, then the dumping began. Many who received XPY from their HashPoints started cashing out, at a lower price than the market (so that they would get the money faster), and it was at a rate that GAW could not counterbalance. We are talking about daily trading of 1000BTC value - at that time, it would've cost GAW daily 250-300k USD to buy up the cheap ones and re-sell it at the floor price.
I understand that my reasoning sounds like a "fanatic" speech to you, but it is simply a different perspective. You see this as a scam, because there were many like it, and many fell. And *IF* GAW is legit, they will fall too, because of the anti-hype generated by these exact discussions and speculations.