and if these units become paper weights then I've got no one to blame but myself however I believe in this technology and the potential of where it will go
No well-designed FPGA board became paperweight ever. There's a quite thriving secondary market in them, they have so many different uses.
The only FPGA boards that had fallen badly in price either:
1) didn't have any memory attached and no way to attach memory
2) didn't have sensible communication channels to get the data in and out
Historically on this forum most FPGA talk was about ngzhang's Icarus & Lancelot and Enterpoint's Cairnsmore. Those are the quite perfect examples of not being well-designed. In particular Cairnsmore had problems with internal clock distribution between the 5 FPGAs on the board.
Every statement I made is true. I offered a letter of credit - they required upfront. Im not sure what your angle is here, but theres no conspiracy for you to play on here.
I have no angle here (or "I have no alpaca in this race", as they say on this board.)
I'm just observing and it is quite obvious that "I offered a letter of credit" and "Companies do not spin up $20M worth of product on letters of credit" are not even nearly synonymous and you somehow suddenly switched sides between yourself and Xilinx. This is a very definition of a word "shifty" as it is used in business negotiation. It is quite obvious that you hiding something material and they must have found this while negotiating the terms. If you habitually talk in a business meetings like you post here on this forum then I completely don't wonder why they get suspicious, require prepay for everything and count their fingers after shaking hand with you.