This is pretty much right: if the price were to drop significantly, features would vanish. There's a certain amount of mileage that can be gained by building in bigger batches, and optimising some of the manufacturing steps and subassemblies but the big savings come when you redesign. You can be sure that we won't sacrifice flexibility or sound quality though - otherwise the whole product is flawed.

You're safe getting a mk2: there are about 1000 of them out there already, and there will be many thousand more before anything else happens in order for us to get the best value out of the fixed-cost items (test rigs, stock, etc).

We've always been committed to supporting our customers, and I really don't see that changing; for example, we offer all the features applicable and possible on the mk1 hardware to mk1 owners (and there are only a few hundred of those). When next-gen hardware arrives, the same will hold true - the basic empeg machine is pretty much the same between mk1/mk2, there are just more bells & whistles on the mk2 :)

Hugo