It's not a waste of resources, and the most egregious issue is not just that it's a violation of trust to the customers left waiting for their orders, but that

It's not a waste of resources, and the most egregious issue is not just that it's a violation of trust to the customers left waiting for their orders, but that it's a violation of trust to the already fulfilled customers. Each hash that gets submitted to the live network "takes a percentage" of the output of the mining pool and of the overall network output. BFL (the maker, and their upstream vendors for that matter) have privileged access to the newest hardware on the planet at the time when it's going to be most valuable. Customers whose orders have been fulfilled have an expectation that BFL (I'll grant even, only because they promised so) is not actively working with the money provided by new customers to devalue the good provided to their old customers by the hardware that is their existing sunk cost. The community rallied behind them, in part because they promised to leave that job to the new customers. You may see it as a waste, but I don't think the FTC will agree with you. The ridiculous pre-order delivery delays could have been excused only if BFL does not really have a stake in seeing that delay grow longer. It's more obvious now that they did have a very real stake in prolonging that delay. Read the article. They weren't doing two day burn-in, they were burning in new units until there were enough more new units to replace them in the test facility. That's some bad faith action right there.