Honestly I kinda feel bad for Dr Lava. I really believe he is someone who holds this hobby close to his heart. He was someone we looked up to, or at least held respect for. Now everybody's turned against him. Ready to burn him at the steak.
Do we all have the right to be pissed at him, ''HELL YES'' we did, and still do.
We all saw it coming with his product being so important to our builds. like the DUNE novel.
''He who controls the spice, controls the universe''
For those who have been here long enough, we all know that his reliability has been pretty hit and miss over the years. How many times has he waited till he has no stock on hand, before he reorders?
Every time a new diode came out 6x 8X 12X 445 he would run out and we would all be hanging.
Thats why people who knew better would always stock up.
Now the most fuc*'D up part was that he totally dropped the ball the last few months.
He completely vanished and decided to brush everyone off. Told everybody new drivers were coming in, and would be shipping out soon.
Everybody sending payments to him with the dreaded google checkout.
Only to be stiffed with no product, and no response as to why.
Then he has the nerve to come back to a semi active status. Tells us all that he's sorry, that he got sidetracked with his education. Then acts all shocked that so many of us are pissed.
But now things are really fu*ked up. We're pissed and feel betrayed, and he feels the same. I know he realizes that he let us down.
I believe he has apologized, probably a little to late for that, but at least he did.
I guess what I'm getting at, is that the way we all feel. The way we see how it all went down. May not be how Dr lava intended it to.
Honestly I don't think any of it was intentionally out of disrespect for us, or the hobby. I don't think he sat around thinking to himself ''fu*k'em they can all wait''.
Maybe when he was 2 months and hundreds of PM's behind, he thought he was only a week or so behind???
He just made some very poor decisions with a very valuable product. He might be able to save lives someday. Just very lacking in a business sense.
He has come to terms that he cant handle it on his own. From my understanding he will be letting others be distributors of his product. Thats a step in the right direction.
As far as alternatives go, we do have more choices. Especially for 445's. Most of us knew that some of the stock flashlight drivers would work in a pinch. Now most of us would not normally take the chance with a $50 diode. However it was not untill Dr lava's crappy business sense forced us to do just that.
Well some of the DX drivers actually work very well with the 445's. The flex drive sure as hell don't have no SOS strobe function, or high and low settings
My point is it just kinda sucks it all ended this way. Lava really does know's his shit. He had some pretty interesting stuff going on about 445 optical corrections. His flexdrive v2's are the bomb
