> I don't know that it is enough to afford to pay salaries to several employees.

It's not necessarily been paid for full-time working hours.

> As to sourcing the PA6T cpus, as a previous customer, Paul might have been
> able to secure these on his own

Yes, that's what's strange about Trevor's (or Paul's, if correctly reported by Trevor) story. Varisys had purchased PA6T chips before, so should have been eligible for Apple's "final call".

> Trevor HAS paid Varisys for the development of three motherboard.

It's even four: Nemo, mATX Cyrus, ATX Cyrus+, Tabor.

> I [...] would even lay the decision to use the P1022 at Paul's feet - it
> was the type of cpu he stated his preference for over the PA6T

Availability and compatibility aside, 1.2 GHz e500v2 doesn't seem like proper replacement for 1.8 GHz PA6T.

> that preference probably helped cinch the decision to use the
> P5020 and P5040 on X5000 motherboards.

That wasn't a question of preference. In 2012/2013, there simply was no other sensible CPU choice to make for a new, high-performance (in PPC terms, that is) desktop PPC board than QorIQ P5. (I've never seen any PPC476FP-based SoC for sale on the respective manufacturer's website or at semiconductor distributors, so minimum purchase quantity would likely have been too high for A-Eon anyway.)