This is a bit different from a kickstarter idea that flops. Vertex was a well known company in the marine aquaria world that had been around for years with many products already on the market. Controllers had also been around for several years, so while they may have had a different take on the interface, the concept of a controller was not new. Given this you can forgive people for buying into a new controller from Vertex.
As far as the retailers go,
this post is informative. I think the retailers got taken for a bit of a ride on it as well; if you believe
@Ryanbrs (and I have no reason not to,) vertex presented the controller as a completed product. BRS wisely saw the potential issues and sold it as a beta device. I'm sure they and premium aquatics have taken heat from customers over the cerebra. If you read the post above, it sounds like BRS would probably do it differently if they had to do it over. My only issue with the retailers is that there were several things which didn't make sense or add up when V1 was released and they seemed to accept them without asking a lot of questions.
If you followed the story over the past 3 years, from when it was first announced for sale, to its release, the subsequent announcement of the ground-up rebuild and all the delays, there have generally been two groups of people. Those who believed (or believed in) Vertex and the cerebra and those who didn't. All along, it's taken some faith to believe that Vertex would eventually produce a viable product and the events could be interpreted differently, depending on whether you believed them or not. Even now, things are looking pretty grim but we just don't know for sure.
