Tell you what, if I can find 10 buyers for the old design, even though it's known to not be ideal in various ways, I'll consider doing another batch. The main reason I don't want to is that I know I can do better, that's it. The other reason is consistency and quality of assembly, though they were fine, I know I could do better with better gear, and don't want to spend on it for a design I'm not 100% happy with. I hope that makes sense.

I could take a few, even if it means I pot them into a connector and sell them on to my customers if I dont need them myself. Might help to make the numbers. I'd be happy with 2 to possibly 4 of them.

Well, that's probably 4-6+ so a few more to "sell" and I'll consider making one final batch of the current design.

Are you actually building these up yourself by hand?

If it makes it any easier I could build mine myself too... I would be very satisfied with a bare PCB.

Solder paste, and placement by hand, baked with reflow profile by modded FreeEMS firmware. I don't want to invest in a nicer stencil setup until the design is improved. With a nice stencil I could knock them out quickly and consistently enough for it to be worthwhile. I could also invest in having a batch made, but I'm hesitant about the QC aspect of that.

I do small quantity PCB design/development all the time (professionally). We have most of our boards fabbed/assembled in china even for the small lots and their quality is typically way better than anything we can do in house. At the prices they charge it is not even remotely worth it for us to build them ourselves.

Not so worried about the PCBs, nor the assembly (though I've had it happen that square packages have been wrongly placed), more about substitution of parts. There is also the problem with insufficient capital to kick start the effort. Then there's the main point: I'm unhappy with the current design and don't want to make more of them until I've improved it.