I'm beginning to think you're right, there is always some reason for shipment delay every month, and what keeps you in there is the threat of losing your place in the pre-order queue.

I could take pre-order money and buy mountains of FPGAs with it.

When eventually the sucker I mean customer wakes up and asks for their money back I can give it to them.

Off course nobody was ripped off, they got their money back, so I got a free loan, and maybe their currency depreciated a little over time, but all that matters is they got refunded.

Arbitrage scams work best when nobody feels like a victim.