Based on reports at AVS this morning, the UMC-1 has had another delay for some software revisions. One long-time supporter was critical of the decision to take credit card info recently and get folks hopes up in light of this delay, and he got a 30-day ban and had his IP blocked. The Emotiva forum is now in "maintenance mode" so nobody but staff can log in or even see existing threads.
I could probably take a moment to be really critical of Emotiva in light of all of this, and I do think their forum moderation is ill-advised (it reminds me immediately of AV123's shenanigans earlier this year, and that's not an association any internet-direct company should be promoting). However, one could also take it as an example of how difficult it is for any smaller company to develop this sort of technology. We could probably come up with a dozen companies that have struggled like this. Each company tends to handle the public side of those struggles differently and the specific challenges that arise vary, but it happens to everybody to varying degrees. Sometimes the product that finally emerges is left scarred by the process - incomplete, flawed, or otherwise imperfect - and sometimes the product ends up being simply excellent. Time will tell where the UMC-1 ends up, as it will for the R-972/Model 997.