For what it's worth, A LOT of faith is put into sellers/makers to come through, especially since it has worked in the past, and this was 2 of our own who had great reputations here and I think we all wanted them to succeed as well as seeing items produced that have never been produced at that level AND licensed. Lots of hopes and dreams based around that even though there are plenty of examples shown where it fails through here on the board and they did not set out to be scammers.
Some of this stuff takes time to produce so SOME of the long wait times are actually the "norm" for items. The Inigo Montoya sword(5 years to fruition), among many others come to mind, I was just a young collector when you had to wait months to over a year for a garage made ST armor, so I feel like the our community tends to have a lot of patience to begin with because of the storied history like that.
Also a part of that storied history is companies who go out of business before producing their paid for items and leaving the customer with no item or no refund(for good or bad reasons). Sometimes its a "garage builder", who simply took on more work than they could handle, who loses their reputation and faces/gets banned from this site. Then you also have the people who just want to take as much money as they can and run. It has all happened on this board since it's inception and many in-betweens, I kind of broad stroked it here.
All that creates a fanbase that will grab pitchforks and torches at the first delay, to those who continue to defend a maker, well after the dust has settled and of course everything in between.
Full disclosure, ANOVOS doesn't owe me anything, I did purchase something from them however. It was a small instock item(Han ESB belt tools), that still too almost a month to make it to my door. I, like many if not most or all here wanted them to succeed as they had many, many items I wanted, and I believe we all wanted a licensed high quality prop/costume maker to "make it" for a change since we're like 0-4, 0-5 now?