Re: Is there a point where we get to feel sorry for them?
I compare both projects as being very similar.
Both of them were caused by the directors completely mismanaging the business, lying through their teeth and stealing backer's money while throwing it away on things they didn't need to.
In the OpenPandora case, EvilDragon stepped up and made his own business out of it but not before it had lost an AWFUL lot of people's money (i.e. you had to pay ED more to actually get one of the promised things even if you'd already paid OP). Very pyramid-schemey in the end but ED was a nice guy trying to make the best whereas everyone else involved was pretty much trying to splash money on themselves.
In the RCL case, the directors were all pretty much responsible and there was just too much politics to ever have a coherent business. Two directors bowed out, the rest have resigned, and yet only a tiny portion of the units could EVER have actually been finished and the lawyers are vying for monies that haven't been paid, IndieGoGo is (supposedly) chasing with debt collectors, backers are building a class-action-suit-type-thing on other sites, etc. etc. Though Janko may be "innocent" in those matters, they still were associated with the companies until post-release, and the release software is atrocious.
However you look at it, it's not a company that you want to do business with. I followed the OP scandal very closely as I very nearly bought one (I used to program for the GP2X, the OPs "predecessor" if you like, from Gamepark Holdings who just delivered stuff and didn't have this hassle) and though ED personally saved some backers... pretty much I wouldn't want to touch any product that was developed that way.
These people, in particular are being huge con-artists - the project is severely delayed, there's been any number of "next week" promises that never materialised and the final product is a shoddy copy of what you could achieve with a GP2X from 10 years ago, with an off-the-shelf compiled binary of FUSE, and some silly "Hall of Fame" bit plugged into the software that - I think - was never properly paid for and all development on the firmware stopped because of that.
Even Lee Fogarty (another of the RCL contracted-out guys) says that the second firmware was shoddy and unfinished and released in the state he last saw it in, with thousand of bugs filed against it with the authors... who weren't paid so never fixed them.
It's a business scam that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole, and it has NOTHING to do with the product itself (but the product is extremely sketchy precisely because of that). It could be a ground-breaking device, there's no way I'd buy it from those people.