With the Raspberry Pi 5 out in two weeks, all the held-back inventory of older models will be dumped, prices will plummet, availability will become a non-issue.
In that sense it's a wise move.
Interestingly Digikey has over 2000 left. I wonder if they are limiting quantities.
I guess you haven't been looking recently? I can go to a local store and pick one up. It looks easy to pick up one online too.
Note I'm not disagreeing, just saying in some cases, the ones in-store are kits.
For a hobbyist / individual, is that really a big deal? I mean, how many do you need at one time?
Anyway, the claim all along has been that supplies would be "back to normal" by the end of this year, and so far things seem to be tracking that way. If you look at rpilocator.com now, the entire first two pages are full of green lines, which is a DRASTIC improvement compared to just 6 months ago. And some of the major distributors are getting in shipments of 5,000, 6,000 at a time of some models and having them in stock for weeks on end. So one can clearly see that the situation is improving rapidly.
That said, I will make no claim one way or the other with regards to the question of whether or not shipping a Pi 5 is a "good idea" or not.
Having trusted local resellers is a much more scalable way to sell to local markets.
I also expect that using resellers ensures better odds of protecting the brand/project goodwill. Resellers deal with problems like "I paid a ton of cash for a board and it arrived late and/or broken". Support alone is a nightmare, and I recall that raspberry Pi struggled with PR when they started out. I vaguely recall Liz Upton being behind some ill-advised episodes that didn't improved Raspberry Pi's image and would get anyone other PR person sacked.