That's a strawman that can't happen with the system we will launch next week as explained in the ongoing lab reports at bitsharestalk.org.  The network software ensures that "gimpy hardware" is not overtasked until such time as the community votes to turn up the throttle as the load on the network grows and produces the funding needed to pay all delegates to upgrade to the next level of hardware.

The October 13 system runs fast enough to host the total number of transactions needed by all 600+ coinmarketcap blockchains combined. Which is pretty amazing, don't you think? 

You're quibbling about how long it will take to iron out the bugs in something we won't need till next year and whether the initial announcement could be misinterpreted in some creative way as a hopeful controversy while ignoring a clear home run effort by the BitShares community. 

Fact is, current performance is impressive and we are on a clear path to achieve real time blockchain operation when we need it with no remaining breakthroughs required - only the normal debug activities that all developers encounter in wringing out load balancing issues.  

Next year's network software is expected to be buggy at this point it time,
because we've been focusing on the product we want to launch now.