You might look at the situation asking yourself if a) Purism wants to build a community for people willing to spend money, time and effort to get and develop a privacy-oriented device (and hardware sales are a happy by-product), or b) wants to foster hardware sales to any people who want to be free to do their own thing with a privacy-oriented device.
Since I consider myself in the second category, if it were true that Purism wanted to follow the first way and get out of chronological order to serve people who contribute back, it would push me away from putting money in their venture.
Anyhow, I guess Purism wouldn’t dare to state it clearly (a behavior strongly pushing away any kind of customer but the desired on), and therefore this reasoning is a pure inference exercise based on the sparce information lurkers might get on this forum.