Could be that they are taking a loss on the initial units in order to get going. Once the campaign backers are taken care the product is commercialized and then the price goes up. I’ve seen more than one Kickstart campaign used to launch a company in just this way. (Tempest PWS is another example).
Anyway they aren’t vaporware. I backed the campaign and received my units today.
I dunno about this; IME even when it was highly approachable most people didn’t do it. I was around back then, got my first Commodore in '84, and even the Geek / Nerd circles were mostly just for people swapping copies of commercial software. It wasn’t any better when I graduated High School in '91 and even in College almost no one outside of STEM was doing any programming.
It wasn’t and still isn’t a popular activity.