Of course. I am as disappointed in the situation as much as anyone. But, when a service is actually formed by a refurbished HST, the travelling experience is as good as anything in the UK. The ones that i managed to use all ran to time and did not break down in service. The issue appears to be poor daily availability as we have been saying for six months or more.
I agree, I suspect while delivery and project management may be poor, the current handling of the situation is pretty good. HSTs are never chanced upon in service, if there's an issue we get a DMU sub and they seem very good at magiccing them out of nowhere at very short notice(literally >10 minutes on occasions), and while some services end up extremely packed, very very few HSTs have failed on a service, they've always been thrown back into the depot and we've gotten the reliable, but less pleasant stock instead.
It's not as if we have HSTs with incompatible couplers stuck in the middle of nowhere on a single line section of HML weekly, they seem to be quite conservative with usage, which creates unfavouable press, but I suspect it's the lesser of two evils.