May-be you are just living to close to him (dealing with someone on internet and in real life is totally different...)
Ok if he didn't send the product to everybody yet, this is clearly unacceptable.
Regarding someone to help him with the frontend, it is always the same problem, it means he would have had to spend more money to hire someone (this would have required the store to be already profitable).
Actually hiring someone would certainly have been more useful than spending 5000$ on having a company working on new splitter design... (the business was too young for that, as it wasn't its main goal)
edit: obviously I assume what he said is true...
There are a couple of folks who verified that weeks after paying, they never received a product, and he refused to respond to their inquiries. I'm not sure if it's changed in the past week, but that's status as of back then.
He wouldn't have had to spend money with someone volunteering to help, and I totally agree he blew money on some odd splitting thing. Products already exist, why was he spending thousands of dollars to polish a wheel? Makes no sense.