I think they got a prototype slapped together, and then called it good and kept putting them together like that with whatever junk they could find.
My first HN-01 was a nice Bloodwood. I loved its color contrasts at the corners, where you could see the ends of the boards next to the tops. But it had a small paper thin split in the wood on the left next to the display, which eventually opened up more into a larger crack. They never responded to my emails about that.. , but they did several months later when the touchscreen when out on the display. The display's mounting also failed shortly after the touchscreen failed, and the bottom of the LCD fell in about 1/4". I can't even imaging how bad that unit must have looked inside, it was ordered near the end of the pre-sale. I wonder if they resold it later to the person who said there's has a crack?
I was eventually able to get a Padauk replacement from them that they offered me. And FWIW the internals don't look quite as bad as those other pics. It is still mostly hot glue holding things together, but it has a couple of small stand offs from the display to the pi and then from the pi to the back to hold things up. So at least no doll parts and there wasn't a big layer of electrical tape over it all either. Getting to the SD was pretty easy, and it only had a little glue on it so I just pulled it out without any trouble. All the glue was still on the card, but it was on scotch tape and peeled off with it. I still need to copy my card this weekend (Thanks for your post about it
@JigMelon), but as it is, even with a backup it will probably still have its recent problems with the occasional hanging on startup and the temp display and graph freezing up often now..