AVFan,

I agree with you that the 2005 seems to share a number of things with the 7500. It's hard to sort out exactly what the relationship is between ATI and Outlaw with any degree of certainty, though they do seem to share key personnel and production facilities.

If I had to guess, I'd say that ATI invested quite a lot in their production facility, but they didn't sell enough volume to amortize that cost in a reasonable time frame. The solution may have been to create a secondary "value" brand using the same parts, the same plant, the same personnel, and have different costmetics for the different brands, even though the internals are similar/(or possibly even the same). They had to rebrand the "value brand" so as not to alienate their existing dealer network who are selling the similar ATI gear at substantially higher price points. Outlaw doesn't show internal pics of the new 7500/7700 internals, so it's hard to say for sure unless someone wants to open up their 7500/7700 and post the pics.

Cheers,