Funny that the article does not mention the PA31, almost 4000 were built. When the Saratoga only had 20 orders in '84 the PA31 series had double that. Its strange that Piper has all but dumped the Navajo series despite it still being so popular compared to its other stablemates. I will not even go into how good the PA-42-1000 (Cheyenne 400LS) is and its been dropped from the production list as well, perhaps it was just too soon like the SAAB 2000.
But maybe the article was right, Piper succeeded on cheap, when it went on to build inspirational aircraft it went broke.