Q. What went wrong with the RTL?
A. I didn't get a direct answer with this other than delays were made to make better decisions about what direction the company would take due to competition and bitcoin price.
The difficulty rise was too rapid and manufacturers started offering very efficient 28nm products at $3/GH - Ken realised Nextreme chips were too expensive to manufacture and too inefficient on power. The right decision was to switch to Easicopy, and this is the decision I believe Ken made. I've been saying it for a while now, quote me on it later.
If this is the case, people should be extremely impressed with the companies ability to "turn it up", and ken's guts to take this step despite the fallout we're seeing on the forums.
You are overlooking one crucial element : timing. Easycopy as I understand is a full mask set process, like any other asic. Tape out process would be pretty much identical too, and therefore if the RTL is only finished just now, and even assuming eASIC has some magic software to synthesize an RTL in to a GDSII by pressing a button, it will be months before that results in actual chips.
OTOH, nextreme should in theory allow at least samples in a very short amount of time (especially ebeam samples, but even single mask wafers ought to be lot faster). So even if those chips are less power efficient and (far) more expensive, I doubt it wouldnt be worth it. We are no where near the point yet where asic production cost is an issue. I do agree that Easycopy should be developed in parallel for when that happens, but I see no reason to halt nextreme chips unless for whatever reasons, these cant be manufactured within a short order either. Which would point to eASIC nextreme 3 not being ready.