The main problem with alpha is that they are only middle men.

They don't seem to be doing any of the design or manufacturing work in house. From what I have been able to gather from what little they have said, is that all the design work has been subcontracted out.

Subcontracting work is always a risk, because the subcontractor may not understand the urgency or there may be misunderstandings. It's worth pointing out that one of alpha's early design documents (from July 2013) which basically describes how a scrypt miner might work, and how the process of mining works, was written not by alpha, but by a subcontractor (Dexcel - curiously, the author's username left in the document's metadata is Amit Sinha, Dexcel's CEO).

In my experience of electronic design, for anything critical, you need to give your subcontractor as tight a specification as possible, preferably with a proof-of-concept or reference design. From what I can tell, alpha went to their engineering contractor Dexcel, and basically said "make scypt miner, pls!".

You can see the lack of focus in the design of the miner. There is a very complex, expensive, "viper interface board". It looks very nicely designed for the task, and it must have taken hundreds of man-hours to design, and given its complexity is likely to be expensive to manufacture; they've then needed to do a lot of porting of software to their custom hardware. Everyone else has just used an off-the-shelf $20 single-board computer like a raspberry pi, or a beagleboard.

They've already said that the miners aren't going to be manufactuered by alpha. The manufacturing is going to be subcontracted to an assembler in India.