The way I (mis) understood the recent announcement was that the RTL thingy applied to the boards themselves and not the chips. Could it be that the chips are all fine and ready to go but the boards are being redesigned?
From what I have read, the RTL process is before the ASIC being made process, because ASIC's do not need software (that's the point, the software is very minimal to drive the ASIC logic).
So we are still behind the making the first ASIC chip stage. I reckon the prototypes just did not work with the boards and both the boards and chip needed to go back to the drawing board.