To survive, if the whole model of the citizen-miner survives, these companies are going to have to do things differently and develop non-hateful relationships with their customers. KnC seems to be leading the way. HF is working to follow. At least that's my bet.
The road to customer goodwill for Hashfast seems pretty clear to me:
1) Offer full refunds to batch 1 customers.
2) Ship Batch 2 order (and following batches) on time (thanks to not having to ship 5x the batch 1 orders because of the MPP).
That way batch 2 and following get their equipment on time, if they don't get a good ROI, they have only themselves to blame.
Batch 1 customer should be ecstatic of not having lost 50%+ of their money. (Even with the MPP I expect the ROI to be less than 50% for batch 1 customers.)
BTW you only need to achieve less than 33% of your cost to get the 4x hashing power (not less than 25%):
*** From Hashfast MPP page:
You buy a Baby Jet for 50 BTC, and we ship it on October 25th. January 23, 2014 comes and goes, and it turns out that at the Baby Jets nominal hashrate, it would only have generated 25 BTC during that 90 day period. Calculated out, it would have taken an additional 400 Ghash/s of capacity shipped with your Baby Jet on October 25, 2013 to generate 50 BTC. We cant go back in time to give you that 400Ghash/s. Instead, HashFast will double that and give you 800 Ghash/s in additional capacity.
So if you achieve 33% or less, it would have taken an extra 2x the hashing power to break even, so they double that and send you an extra 4x.
I'm surprised D&T didn't catch that, he/she/it is usually good with numbers and details.