They DID take into account the possibility of everything going wrong. The way I saw it right from the start was that late October was an "if everything goes right" release date, and January 1st was an "if everything goes wrong" release date.
That's not how they portrayed things:
our team is highly experienced in exactly this field and we're currently ahead of our original timeline. Honest Abe, we're scheduling shipments for October of 2012.
They made it sound like there was no way they'd miss Oct. Let's see what BFL_Josh really said:
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/104-shipping-2-3-weeks-2.html#post1461When we made our announcement for shipping dates, we padded in some extra weeks in case of delays
We have basically padded everything we could in terms of estimates and that padding is what has allowed us to bump specs on short notice and keep our shipping times in line even in the face of delays.
There has been some delays at that stage, but we have the padding, so it's not been a critical issue.
There has also been some delays at the foundry, but again, we have padding, so it's not been a critical issue.
I would like to tell you we are still on time or pretty close to it, because we are.
That post is from Oct! Oct was never portrayed as a best-case scenario. It was always portrayed as an almost sure thing. Read the actual quotes again. Even in Oct they claimed they were "on time", which by now should be clear was a flat out lie. They're still not close to finishing even after months have passed.