I've seen comments on the Empeg BBs about the Rceiver software getting a revamp in the not too distant future.
There's no doubt about it, the rio Receiver is part of SB's strategy going forward - of course that could change at any moment.

It could well be that Rio Receiver Mk2 is just around the corner and thats maybe why (a) SB has recently started selling them for less than $200 each and (b) why Tiger direct is getting out its old stock - could also be that Tiger direct are stopping selling them fullstop hence the sale.

I think the 1st Generation Receever is pretty good and a few tweaks could make it a really popular product maybe.

With only 4 MB of RAM the current platform is a little light on spare resources to do much serious hacking I think.