I think we see a little of what your talking about with Shapeoko ... awesome idea, execution, community... but the guy hit a scaling hurdle and put maybe a tad too much on himself, but now it is being handled by others, so the whole thing worked out. Other projects will have other experiences, and his situation is unique in most other ways, but it does coincide a little bit with what you're saying.
Another one is Open Pandora, the game console. It didn't use Kickstarter (it started before that was popular), and it took a while to get going. Go read their blog about the ir production difficulties. The last I checked, they had shipped only about 4K units. They started with a high-end mobile processor, but that was years ago, and the latest gen phones and tablets have eclipsed them. They've had quality issues too, because they didn't have good production line testing.
