Shoulda coulda woulda...

Honestly, have you talked to any dealers that dealt in the Sherwood products? The Trinnov was / is among the slickest setups ever for getting eq / balance / delay / phase settings optimized auto-magically BUT the rest of that unit has been plagued with qc / reliability / issues and an UI that is from the dark ages of OSD.

Personally I would never put up with those kind of issues in any product, especially one that was supposed to be a good long term investment...

The issue of whether it would've made sense to stick with a unit that offered better SQ / reliability but ZERO in the way of modern connectivity / convenience / calibration is similarly easy for me to give a thumbs down -- heck how many folks have weighed in here saying that even the fabulous range of modern convenience items that are rolled into units like 5007 are not appealing enough to overlook lack of XT32 or balanced outputs? It is one thing to try a play at "retro purist" (like the P7) and another to have a stack of slick source devices that have no way to be "plumbed" into a modern AV setup. I am sure the legions of folks that drive their flat panels or projectors EXCLUSIVELY through an Oppo are happy to have the P7 but I sorta like to have surround on more than just that one source and there is no way my goofy room is ever gonna get by w/o a bunch of EQ...

Ultimately the choice of a "manufacturing partner" is one of those "live and learn" kind of things. I remember back when even the much admired Apple was ridiculed for having notoriously short inventory. Now they are a model of how to have the "pipeline" ready to unleash the floodgate of product on its eager buyers. That did not happen overnight. If they made foolish choices in manufacturing partners that could have "delivered" quantity but had angry hordes of DOA / malfunctioning units with poor qc they would have been wiped out. As for the 978 I will gladly endure a long development cycle so long as the units "just work" from the first power-up until well into the next "next big thing", which by the looks of what minor headway has been made by firms outside the mainstream is looking pretty meager...