ain't that the truth.

I don't know why people are so quick to accept this type of behavior in this industry.  I can see thinking there aren't many alternatives, although outright defending it seems tantamount to sticking yourself in the eyeball with a hot poker - and paying for the poker as an added bonus.

delays are possible in any tech development effort, however, that is why any company with any experience moves on multiple vectors towards the goal, creating options for potential breakdown of any one of them along the way.

just on a quality controlled basis these sorts of efforts require redundancies, normally, and multiple suppliers for any and all components is the norm.  That this apparently isn't in place further underscores how nascent this industry is, but it also provides an opportunity for learning.  Get your ISO certs, people, for damn sake.

until the customers of these people stop just accepting it as some sort of unavoidable pitfall, which it is not, this will continue.  people need to wake the hell up and hold these people accountable.  the companies themselves need to wake up and demand better of themselves as well, as to this point their performance has been almost uniformly pathetic.