It reads like a lightly-edited press release. By far the biggest mis-step in the company's history and not a word.
I'd say the biggest misstep was the swelling of Bre Pettis' ego and subsequent firing of all of the original employees, including his own father, but the open source screwjob would be a close second.
The biggest misstep is the unusable 5th gen.
I'm not confused as to why, but there is pretty good summaries out there: http://josefprusa.cz/open-hardware-meaning/ - all comes down to trying to market to, and mangle the definition of open source hardware IMHO.