What they have done is really no different to what I have seen many times in the 30 years I have been in business. They have taken a huge risk on a lot of balls all staying up in the air for long enough for them to start selling planes and getting some cash back in. I've seen this in conventional business, where a startup company picks a lot of small suppliers and screws them on (very) extended payment terms to raise the working capital, and sometimes it doesn't work out. In normal business this "bet the whole shop to get started" practice is severely frowned upon and most sensible suppliers won't touch such a company with a 20ft bargepole no matter what telephone figures they spout, but in aviation one gets used to people pulling stunts all the time. I guess that since Eclipse is obviously smaller than most of the major equipment vendors they could not screw them very hard, so they had to screw somebody else and the deposit-paying customers were the only option.
IMHO the VLJ market is massively oversold and the major beneficiaries of the countless $millions that will be spent on the VLJ marketing will be turboprop manufacturers who can deliver proven solutions that go further for less money while carrying a lot more stuff.