Sure, maybe a few sets like GMK Minimal got left out in the rain and got ruined. Now tell me how that's GMK's fault and not the shipping courier's.

> This is something Andy has already detailed on. Moving to smaller sets does not mean faster production.

Maybe so, but when we are talking about sets with thousands of kits being made compared to hundreds there will of course be some sort of difference. This is why GMK Dots took so long, while other sets were seemingly shooting out of the pipeline. The time to sort these sets and package them is also a concern, which adds time to a larger set comparatively.

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> Like I said, upwards. While I don't know this specific designers' history with working with vendors/GMK, I was referencing community sets in general. Depending on the designer this stage could potentially take a very long time.

If designers properly match their renders to their chosen color reference, there is zero excuse why the colors should take more than one round of color matching unless the color is very bright, pale, or a shade of grey, black, or white. GMK uses proper equipment to color match according to the reference you are sending, so most color-matching rounds that are rejected are the designer's fault. GMK Dracula's colors were referenced using digital hex codes, which explains why it took an absurd amount of time to get it right.

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> You're right but we can only base estimates off information we have

You can't say this and then further down in your comment say that shipping or designer's personal situations will somehow, someway go wrong.

I'll reply to each of your points individually:

> 8-9 community sets seems to be their current max capacity going forward.

It's not as simple as "insert amount of sets" per month. The sets GMK are going through right now are very large in the number of kits. As we get down to the smaller sets in the queue (there are a ton of sets in the queue right now that don't even have 1000 base kit orders), they will be able to go through many more sets than a month with larger sets (ie Metropolis, Striker R2)

> Even if they can keep the estimate of Q4 2023 for all in queue sets, any current IC will still be several months away from GB date.

A set doesn't "have" to take months to go into GB. It's completely reliant on if the designer has vendors lined up already and has worked with those vendors to get quotes beforehand.

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> Then we have to hope for a good result in color matching as cannonkeys has already confirmed it take upwards of 6 months to get a sample back, or possibly years in the worst case scenario where multiple rounds are needed.
>
> Andy himself has said they do no consider a set as ordered till is passes all these other checks of MOQ/Payment/Matching/etc. so any number they give is from order date confirmation, which seems to be 10 months at best.

GMK Mizu completed GB in June of 2019, Went through 3 rounds of color matching, and the first person to receive theirs from a vendor on the geekhack page was in December of 2019. I don't want to put blame on anybody, but 6 months for one sample round is most certainly an anomaly, considering that a lot of vendor's update pages like Omnitype's show samples being made in less than 2 months. All of this to say: As we get through all of the sets in the queue, lead times on everything from samples, sorting, and shipment will shorten since they have a lot less on their plate to keep up with as visible from GMK Mizu's GB and many other GMK GBs from that time before there were dozens of sets in the production queue.

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> Even when a set is "completed" it takes 3-6 months for some US/CA vendors to land their shipment. There are multiple "completed" sets that you can DHL over in 3 days from the german vendor or wait half a year for the US one to deal with logistics. It was worse in the past yearw and is improving but this just shows how much the current world events effect this stuff.
>
> China just opened the flood gates to covid, who knows if ANY part of their supply chain would be affected by it, most likely yes seeing as how globalized everything is now.

COVID has been the only major world event that has caused a slow-up in GMK's manufacturing, so I do not see how else it would get worse over time. Also AFAIK, none of GMK's manufacturing relies on China.

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> Anyone giving a one year timeline on GMK is optimistic at best and ignorant at worst, there are just too many factors to predict. Even hitting a single snag in the chain will drive delivery a quarter to half a year out.

So you are so well versed in GMK's manufacturing line that you know exactly how long a "snag" takes to sort out? And what do these snags look like?

GMK has SIGNIFICANTLY increased their production capacity. GMK Andy said that every set in the queue will finish in September of 2023 and even the "GMK Queue and Estimated Shipping Date" sheet has the last set finishing in Q1 2024. So taking the average of those two sources, it's pretty feasible for this set to ship in a year at most. Sure it's not ideal when we see in-stock sets popping up like crazy, but to not acknowledge that it's improved is just wrong.