Originally Posted by Kardiophylax
After all, these developers can promise all they want, but in the end they are under no obligation to deliver at any sort of satisfactory level to people.

Actually if they want to stay in business, using crowd funding as the main way to fund their projects, it's better for them to deliver their product with some satisfactory level. Otherwise things might not run well on the next project.
I believe that most of these developers want to go on using kickstarter (or identical), for their future projects.
So maybe things won't deviate so much… let us hope.