"a $500 system that successfully managed the first four months of Soylent shipments."

Successfully is rather overstating it. The shipment of Soylent was delayed by over a year and went at a snail's pace. My shipment was delayed at a rate of roughly one month per month, with it eventually arriving something like six months after the first shipment had gone out, despite being one of the first backers. I can't think of a single metric on which I would call the Soylent shipping process "successful".