He quit before, which is what wound up giving The Fans Strike Back control of their Bantha project and the legacy of quality that Smith Lord Creations used to have that persuaded people to prepay for the 13 figure set that has never been completed.
But it's like with the way his droids just dried up: he has said he can't rerun them because he had to switch factories and lost the tooling, but also he is (rightly so) very reluctant to do second runs of any of the figures, because he doesn't see that the market will buy a full second run and he would be losing money in the transaction. Can't ask him to do that, but it seems to me there are plenty of reasons for him to consider tooling that astromech up again at the new factory and continuing to do smaller runs of those and of course getting to new, different, unique ones.
And then the caveat, if Hasbro lets the flood gates open up on their Retro collection now that they've done the Artoo, too, he's out of business on it anyway. I know he took a hit last year tooling up Retro Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood figures. He only got the the Marion out just ahead of Hasbro's announcement and scrapped his Indy release plans...that's an a lost investment that would probably make me second-guess decisions in the future too.
