That pissed me off so much.
I was one of the backers and I was sooooo looking forward to an affordable home SLS printer. They'd done some incredible engineering, too, in service of getting the price point down to where it was.
Scaling up was going to be a massive challenge for them, but damn, I wish they'd tried instead of phoning it in early.
(Mind you, I'm sure Formlabs paid them handsomely. Would I make the same decision under the same circumstances? I honestly don't know. So far be it from me to judge them, but man do I wish someone would do something about Formlabs' ridiculous prices and monopoly over that space.)
> I wish they'd tried
I'm sure they've tried. From what I recall they've had serious reliability issues on the preview units. So I'd be skeptical if it would have even turned into a successfully delivered Kickstarter. They would have to deliver on that first before even concerning themselves with how to scale up.
So maybe they didn't even get handsomely paid in the acquisition, but were given an option to save face.