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.
Which was announced by a promoted yahoo article. They paid for it so true or not, it should be taken with a grain of salt
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.
Their products seem to number in the hundreds, you call that a large amount? When BFL did their show off your devices youtube video contest, it was the same 20-30 people making several videos. Just not that many people own BFL products.
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).
Now you think this new "fuzzy date" is the right one and that they will still ship before their competitors. Even if they promised the date I wouldn't believe them (after missing how many dates already) but you believe their fuzzy one?
As far as not sending them coins I'll agree with you there, but realize that you sending them your coins before any evidence of a product is a very risky investment, and it may or may not pay off for you.