Indeed, they are many times ahead any previous take on open source hardware exactly because they are pragmatic, without big nebulous plans to attract the crowd, and money.

The later proves to be too easy, and actually doing something with the money raised is much harder that "go to the first ODM behind the corner"

Too many Kickstarter crowd people chose the "go to the first ODM behind the corner" route, and get burned over, and over, and over again.