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The issue for many (and it's been stated several times in this thread and other places) is that LDW did a terrible job advertising their Kickstarter. Many of us have been using LDW's products for YEARS and looking for a product like this for longer...and yet had NO idea this was even happening.
The amount of money they left on the table with their kickstarter has got to be immense. And I think this is the thing that's frustrating a significant number of the folks out there who missed the kickstarter: Had we known, we'd have bought in also.
The stupid thing about it is A LOT of us knew about the beta test and put in beta apps, and many of us who did, DID NOT know about the Kickstarter. That boggles the mind...how does communication go so badly that you can know a product needs beta tested but NOT know that a kickstarter has been opened for it? This was a HUGE miss on LDW's part, and feeds into the complaints and issues they're getting now.
This is compounded by the long release times. Let me be clear, as a software beta tester for a very significant number of games to date and an open source developer myself, I get missing deadlines...God do I.
Let me see if I can do justice to the "complainers" side of the argument for a second:
The kickstarter ran for a very short period of time, missed a large segment of those people who would otherwise have signed up for the kickstarter due to a lack of communication/advertising/whatever, and is now 10 months gone with no release of the software.
Surely the kickstarter could have been kept open for several more MONTHS than it was. Surely there could have been better communication to glean every dollar that *wanted* to be spent on this product and early access to it. Surely opening pre-access to a piece of beta software to backers is not a limited experience. Surely there's little to no reason not to re-open "pay for pre-release access"?
One of the arguments in the thread above was that you can only handle a certain number of complaints at a time as a development shop and opening the doors to more people causes more headache. This is absolutely true, but LDW had gone past that point in the development cycle. The moment they opened the product to Kickstarter backers they opened the flood gates. What happened if instead of 650 backers there'd been 1000? 2000? 10000? Would they have limited access to half the people who paid for it because they couldn't handle the influx? The argument that more people would make LDW's life more difficult fails because they didn't limit the number of backers who could get into early access.
I think the "shut up and take my money" complaint you're all hearing is that due to poor communication (I can't call it anything but) many of us missed the ability for early access. When it was only a few months away, this wasn't a big deal. By the 4th reported missed deadline and 10 months past initial release date, however, many of us are looking at this going, "why not re-open 'early access' and take pre-orders now."
They didn't set a limit on the number of people who could obtain early access 10 months ago, why not allow as many as want to pay in for access now? What changed between 10 months ago and now?
The mind boggling thing, and the thing I think most of the complaints are occurring because of, is that there are a significant number of us that want to pay a company who's in business to make money for access to something we all know very well doesn't work as it could right now. We want to devote some of our free time to reporting bugs, dealing with broken software, debugging problems and offering our time to help fix a product we believe in.
It was not our poor decision making that kept us from being able to do so...it was a lack of communication on LDW's part to properly inform their customer base that a kickstarter was happening. Further it's not our lack of interest or our lack of money that's keeping us from being able to do so now...just (by all accounts) a company's lack of interest in taking that money.
Most of us simply don't understand why we can't throw our money and time at a pre-released alpha/beta piece of software to make it better...not because we decided against backing the software and now regret that decision, but simply because we weren't as well informed (or lucky to have stumbled across it) as others in the community.
The OP has valid points about complaints, complainers and the hew and cry of "OMG you missed a deadline!", I don't mean to detract from that...I've posted many a comment to the same on other forums to other communities about the same things.
But on the other side, when posting something like this, please understand that many people's lack of access and "complaints" right now are as much the fault of LDW's lack of communication as their own failure to join a kickstarter. There's a difference between "I didn't give you my money when I should" and "I never had the opportunity to give you my money."
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