Believe me I would have been much happier if things had gone according to plan!!!
If you look at a thread I posted early this year (where I gave a schedual for new products), you'll see that the plan was to have the REVO (Smooooth) system completed and ready for sale before the start of the summer but in our strive for perfection we decided to run 3 alternative R&D programs on different options before we settled on which was best, rather than rush the first option into production.
The MAX Extreme was never intended to be such a major design change, it was just intended to be a "finishing touches" job but Ant let his enthusiasm get the better of him and again a project that should have taken a couple of months, ended up taking much longer but a much better product has been developed as a consequence.
The Spider should also have been finished sooner (although it is closer to the target date than the others) but the extra time used to take the other 2 products the extra mile, meant that the Spider often had to take a back seat. Having said that, although the Spider is the simplest of the new products (even though it 'looks' the most complex), once again we explored a number of extra options (like the individual metering jets, etc.), in an effort to make the end product that much better.
I can assure you that the end results have been worth the extra effort and as the old saying goes "The best things in life are worth waiting for".
By the way you're right about bringing one new product to market and using the profit it finance the others but thankfully my company has reserves that I've used to finance all 3 products and no doubt we'll be able to replenish those reserves over the next few months, so we can finance the ongoing program of developing more new advanced products.
Regards