Dave, you have as good a handle on what’s been happening there as anyone has had over the past ten plus years. He is a great design engineer who can’t help but try to design new stuff all the time, but a terrible business manager, even when he knows what must be done to make his business successful. A good running, profit making company will always be secondary to tackling a design challenge for him.
This has been discussed with him many times over from several different people who have intimate knowledge about developing and introducing products from design prototype through pre-production and into production at levels from 2 - 5 per year up to 2 - 5 per month. Charles Gardner (search for him on here - he bought the first SAS coupe) had as much knowledge about starting/growing a business as anyone and tried harder than anyone to get him to run his business as a production business, rather than a design concept studio, and it all seemed to fall on deaf ears.
I think most people on here are just happy that we managed to convince someone that going the SAS route, while it promises a ground-breaking product, ultimately causes far more angst and emotional upheaval in the process than it’s worth.