When BFL announced their ASICs, they announced that they were funded by a 3rd party. I'm sure the cash flow helps, but their R&D was not funded by pre-order sales.

They have a history of selling large amount of high-quality FPGA miners, long before all of this stuff about their employee's questionable past came into light. Is this stuff important? Yes. Should this affect the company as a whole? No. Are they still capable of delivering? Yes.

As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.

It's also been said 100x before: if you don't feel comfortable giving them your coins, then don't pre-order from them. You're more than welcome to wait until there's more proof. The last I'd heard, they were well over 100TH of pre-orders, which is quite a lot of people putting quite a lot of coin where their mouth is, betting that BFL really is who they say they are. (Discalimer: I'm one of them).