That is exactly what I am saying.
As you said, doing public pre-sales sets a huge milestone that MUST be met regardless of how the technology co-operates. ref the fallout from BFL's Monarchs and Bitmine.ch/AMT A1 Coincraft miners. Unfortunately input from the Engineering side of many companies - not only those involved in crypto - is ignored once the Marketing group is unleashed. In the crypto mining business pre-sales translates to anything from 'we have this idea...' (ala the GMO vaporware) to Halong's 'we have some engineering test rigs built and running' (but still a work in progress and not ready for Prime Time).
Much to their credit Canaan and yes even the 'evil' Bitmain never did that. They stay quiet while developing and once factory production trials start only then announce upcoming products.
In the beginning of their thread Halong specifically stated that they were fully funded all the way through to at least pre-production trial runs and "we have no need of further funding via pre-orders". Then went on with their spiel never to this day saying *why* they did pre-orders.
Its been so long ago that I kind of remember them saying being fully funded but not sure. But I almost guarantee that the only full funds they had were for the chips and first pre production run and maybe small batch, and rest of money was allotted for NRE. If I had to write a conspiracy theory book about the whole ordeal I would guess that the principles had a good chunk of cash, had the connects to get relationship with samsung and contracted innosilicon to do R&D. Pretty sure they had no choice to do pre-sale. Behind the scenes of the business is rarely seen, and AB prevented much of anything, so pretty much nothing at all is what we got. Not saying they were right, but saying in their shoes with limited resources as everyone has, it was probably the only way to get miners to the market. So you either do it the way they did, or you never get off the ground because you ran out of cash. I think positives of increasing technology to the market outweighs the negatives of forum speak. Has anyone gotten hurt? Did anyone lose their money? I think we are all still better off today than if they never came along.....