Yes there was drama on both sides. As one of the so called "trolls", for pointing out issues with hardware and such, I received my fair share of grief from Barry Altman and others. Threats of legal action, name calling and other such things. He was also very demeaning of the communities that would have had the most interest out of these too. Especially when he couldn't get his own way.
Part of his major failing (apart from the vitriol) with communities was circulating "news" and drumming up interest with announcements of items that never even made it past the dreaming stage (remember some of the AIO computers he had planned like the Inviticus?). Also lets not forget the infamous Chinese production facility that turned out to be a Siemens factory and the announcements of announcements for announcements of things that not even been thought of yet. And announcements of things he haden't even done (remember when he claimed he was in talks to take over the full Commodore and Amiga branding?)
The C64x was a nice idea but it was priced way out of a lot of peoples pockets. And their go to sales line for a while was "We are trying to make the Ferrari and Lamborghini of the computer world." I mean over £300 for a novelty case is one thing but they had a system that was priced well over £1000 that was less powerful than something from Dell. Or even one that I could build myself. And then the Vic Mini, Vic Slim, Amiga Mio, Amiga Mini that were all re badged commodity hardware he was trying to sell at crazy prices. One of the Mini ranged ended up been over $3000!
Lets also not start looking into how they had grand plans of taking over the world of media by making stupidly expensive Amiga branded machines aimed at media production and broadcasting. Which, as many pointed out, they would have had issues with considering how well entrenched Apple is in that sector. And other high end desktop workstation manufacturers.
It's a shame that their forums got razed. The first forum was full of pure gold in terms of grand plans and even grander promises. And both forums were littered with tech support questions that were been handled by a few forum users while CUSA just sat back and didn't bother or said the people were wrong but never gave a reason why.
