Crowd funding, at its core, is a pay first system. This means that it is also in some way speculative. You cannot price your device above what people are willing to live without if the project fails spectacularly (or simply fails to deliver on what they really wanted).
To be fair, if Ubuntu Edge is truly the F1 of phones, then it should be marketed to people that don't bat an eye at spending $830 on a device they have never held and have little guarantee that it will actually be suitable for their needs. I just think that the intersection of those people and Ubuntu users is significantly smaller than Canonical thought it was.
If there were Edge phones on the market in six months time, when my phone runs out of contract, I'd be interested.
But I do not have $700 completely spare to buy a phone that I will not get my hands on until then.