But that just leads to the situation where I'm fine with disruption until the point where I'm suddenly not.
Of course. There is a point where even an early adopter's opinion can tranform from appreciating disruption to not. As there is no absolute truth (not even success on the market place is an absolute truth because success can happen despite of a thing, not only because of it), it all comes down to opinions, analysis, what have you...
For me, Tesla of 2014 was disrupting at a reasonable pace. I know even the early years had improvements that appeared (parking sensors etc.), but at least they were improvements - and in the early days Tesla also offered some retrofits. The pace was simply less manic. I think 2015 was OK too. Even Tesla noted this by grouping D/AP1 and saying nothing big, new would come for a year after the P85D announcement. So they seemed cognisant of this thinking (even though P90D did appear fairly soon)...
Then boom, came along 2016 and everything really went overboard. Multiple major changes spread throughout the year, joined by numerous smaller changes in-between - and this time not just adding things, but taking them away too (trim options disappeared, seat ventilation gone, adaptive spoiler gone, Free Supercharging gone, only to soon re-appear, price going up, down, up down, etc.). This seemed to coincide the time Tesla went from supply to demand constrained as Q2 of 2016 saw a slowdown...
I think at some stage Tesla simply felt they needed as well as can benefit from aggressive optimization from sales and logistics point of view, so the upped the ante considerably, and decided they'd simply use "showroom discounts" and inventory discounts to manage the situation. Whenever they see even a small benefit in some change (for them), they seem to go for it, without much long-term planning in it... They even use reverse discounts to drive demand by pre-announcing price increases (and then next quarter bringing that price down to increase sales again)... Since Tesla chooses not to advertise (well, they advertise now a bit) and not use traditional discount campaigns, they have to resort to this type of fiddling.
IMO that is short-term thinking. They can move the stock (and THE stock), no doubt, and they can use it as a demand lever to some extent to move more of the stock, but they are also paying a PR and customer satisfaction price that I'm not sure is either necessary or worth it. Because I am definitely not sure this is in their customer's benefit at all, on this level. And definitely in-effect it ruins Tesla's "everyone pays the same" thinking as buying a Tesla, price-wise, is one of the most random things in automotive industry at this time...
They just went overboard with this IMO. Toning it down a little does not mean the disruption would have to end, it does not mean having to return to model years. Tesla was disrupting already in 2014.
Maybe the only comparison I can make is with gambling. You have to decide in advance where your limit is and be determined to stick to it.
Not easy if you constantly watch others apparently gaining more for no reason.
Not a bad analogy. Or an auction. Certainly, that is pretty much the only strategy to buying a Tesla these days - define your own parameters and stick to them. But even that is quite unoptimal in my books, because my parameters - and I know those of many who think like me - are not defined simply by what I want, but also by what I can get. A car this price is partly an emotional purchase.
I think with this level of change Tesla is going from emotional disruption to disrupting the emotion and that's where I think they might be wise to tone down a bit. As someone so eloquently put it, this has become a deterrent for some of us...
