Basically what the inventor is saying, is that he's now at the point where he was exactly a year ago. With a bike that is ready to go into production. The huge response of the kickstarter campaign led him to critically review the original kickstarter bike. Not saying that's good or bad, just what's happened. He played his cards close to the chest so backers didn't know much of what was going on in between updates. Basically it was a continuous design review that led to a year of re-design. A few months went down the toilet due to the abandoned cast&bonded lug design.

Lots of backers (if not all) are disappointed with the extra year of delay. Most are happy with the above result.

Joe, if you assume for a moment that the automatic welding process is successful, then the basic titanium material is not that much in landed cost. A titanium frame does not have to cost THAT much more than say a carbon frame or even an aluminium frame, always assuming that these will be built robotic mass production scale and not one-offs. I definitely don't see that it is an impossibility. Our Ti Swift frames are not dis-similar in complexity, and these cost $1000 per frame-set. They were welded one by one by an experienced artisan welder, and a jig had to be made for the welding that was only used for less than 10 frames in the end. You can see that one-off production cost even in China would not be so cheap as to offset this huge disadvantage.

So don't be blinded by the frame material, that is a small part of the whole.