Easy to sit in judgement without knowing the full details. Whilst I'm in no way an apologist for Dave (nor any others catering to the same niche market), as a small business owner I can empathise with his situation.
The last 3-4 years have been weird to put it mildly. When Covid first hit, there was much concern that sales would dry up as punters would need to tighten their spending, however with lockdowns many hobbies boomed, including ours and the VPin guys were utterly inundated with orders. They expanded accordingly and started increasing their stock on hand at which point we started seeing shortages which we now ALL know about an despise.
So on the back of being swamped with orders, none of which they would've wanted to say no to, they were finding stock difficult to secure so that's when order ETAs would have started to blow out. I can personally attest to how difficult that situation is - trying to appease customers whose orders you can't fill right now as you are "waiting for new stock to arrive". It's still happening now and is just as difficult.
What's happened more lately I have no idea about as far as Retroplay in particular is concerned, however it's upsetting to read a lot of comments more or less labelling these guys as criminals or, as directly quoted from the Facebook group @Davefjedi referenced above, scammers. NOBODY builds up a business over the course of 8-odd years with the intention of scamming anyone and whoever the mod of that group is should be advised that such a claim is slanderous and that the message should be removed or altered! I understand that quite a few people have been left out in the cold and out of pocket, but it doesn't excuse them from making defamatory comments.
I've probably said enough for now, so I'll just add that I personally hope that the RetroPlay Administrators will allow Dave to continue trading for a while, so he can fill as many VPin backorders as possible.