Well I had affordability in mind when I saw the $350 on the preorder page, not so much for the actual price which doesn't even include components. I think I'll go the PAiA route. Still, fetishism with old tech in music is pretty much the standard, so I'm not at all surprised people will drool over the $3.5k price tag.
For $350 with parts it'd rip. But as I pointed out below, the chips alone for this thing are over $500. Each pot is gonna be like $3. The rest of the parts are likely cheap... but if they aren't even going to tell you, I mean WTF man. I think everyone fetishes until they get ahold of something and then they let go. I remember how cool that little Teenaged Engineering thing was until I realized they were selling it for more than a Korg X3 cost new. And yeah - that's 20 years ago but it's also a 32-track sequencer workstation with a full 61-key keyboard.