It would certainly kinda suck to penalize everyone just so that the preprod radios work under their rightful name.
But we can do it right from the beginning!
We can put the magic for the pre-prod/alphas/unique radios *at the end*, and 99.9% of the users will be straight in the first try to the clone mode with ZERO delay.
The users with a pre-prod/alphas/unique radios will have to wait a little more (with some room for improvement) and ... it's not the worst thing in the world ;-)
Sorry, but I do not think that putting the magics we think are rare at the end and encountering a delay if so is doing it "right from the beginning." Even if it's 0.1% right now, we know the manufacturer(s) are going to continue to release radios based on this from previous experience.
As a principle this radios must be a very small lot, so affected users will be a very small quantity compared with the other real market users.
I don't think this is a good argument. Unless there is a good reason not to, I'd much prefer to have a repeatable process where we go straight to the radio class we need, send the magic string we need, and fail quickly if it's the wrong one.
And if we look closer we have just ONE radio with this problem so far.
If it's literally one preprod sample radio, then we shouldn't put it in CHIRP at all anyway.
--Dan