FadedFrontiers well designed is not only about working well (and reliably), but also means easy to manufacture, easy to maintain and easy to repair. If a product appears to work well but is a PITA to manufacture, it is still not designed well enough.
I also addressed your second point. They could have had plan to produce 1k machines (kickstarter obviously has limit of how many backers allowed), and then allow pre orders for later batches. Instead they allowed a very large amount of backers on both platforms. With 7 months to the promised shipping date, and they allowed almost 10k backers, they should have had everything in places. A dozen machine built for demo, shows etc, contracts for initial orders of parts etc. Then kickstarter is used only for a platform to gain spotlight, not to fund the project.
I did not go deep into it until now, but the more I think about it it becomes more and more clear it is likely an intentional scam...