I am quite impressed they managed to raise close to 500,000 USD in funding at all considering that their premium pricing level is out of reach for a lot of enthusiasts and that the engineering company does not appear to list any comparable product development as a reference on their website, which might raise doubts about their engineering as well as administrative qualifications (complying with international regulations, etc.).

As a potential supporter, you are far more likely to support an 'unproven' team and to ignore questions about warranty or other legal issues if your financial risk is relatively low, which is why so many low-cost ARM mainboards and devices have been successfully funded via crowdsourcing. Seven thousand dollar servers, on the other hand, are in a totally different ballpark.

Interestingly enough, with a funding total of five hundred thousand dollars and fewer than four hundred fifty backers, the average financial pledge for this project is a little over one thousand dollars so substantially below the three thousand and seven hundred dollars needed to purchase the cheapest offered hardware option. Put differently, a large majority of backers pledged a lot of money for the development of a hardware product although each of them was not willing or able to commit to buying at least one unit of said hardware.

Again, this is quite remarkable.

What I found less remarkable - or rather, remarkable in a highly negative way - were their attempts to explain the differences between libre hardware and libre software development models, which are real and worthy of discussion, by arguing that, unlike any "centrally planned" product developments, only chaotic / uncontrolled / forked and then reforked libre software projects produce optimal "free market" outcomes...