I have made a number of orders with Ray over the last couple of years and have not had any problems with him. I think I would rephrase your statement to be "I guess this is the chance you take dealing with new unproven technology". I'm an old fart and my motto is that you should never buy version 1 of most products. In my life I have seen more new products fail in their early deliveries than succeed. new products always seem to have great promise, but ..... You pay your money you take your chances. Just my well seasoned opinion.
well, I don't see these as version 1. the injection-molded casing solution was based on 2 past generations (the commonly-deiscussed IP66 and IP68 nodes)... it specifically was intended to solve all the past issues.
the use of WS2811 was intended to leverage the success of a commonly-used, and now more-standard chip, already used successfully by many other strings.
the vendor has been doing this product for years, and for the most part a known and trusted entity.
the use of TM1804 chips was a move to reduce the risk even further -- risk, not from the chips, but risk due to the newness of using SSCs with WS2811.
EVERYTHING in this product was intended to use proven, successful techniques and materials to create a product that would withstand additional years of use -- beyond the IP68 product.
The testing by Zach with freezing, with submersion, etc. provided the basic validation.
Early testing of Ray's WS2811 strings by RJ sealed it.
So... there was definitely an understanding that this was a final, ready for anything product. We were charged for a production product, and not given a discount to try samples in a "beta" test.