You are lucky, that was quite shitty to recover from for me.
Yes, it was definitely a learning experience. I no longer invest in any project where the creators are anonymous. In all fairness it was a good con, I actually had a contractor look at the code and it was not cloned but rather written form scratch as far as we could tell (although concepts were borrowed from several different alts) so that made it look legit.
Hasn't Vanilla made a couple of comebacks since then though? Did you sell in a slump?
Pablo.