Ah ok, I was not aware of this. I have been getting most of my components from DigiKey and RS Components, aside from Particle products that is. Good service so far in delivering products, but I must say, I think I would prefer dealing with Particle when it comes to returns etc. It took me about a month to get RS to understand they left out a component in one of my orders... they finally acknowledged and then sent me the wrong one instead 
I hope this has been resolved as I built couple of prototypes using Photon's but if the project takes off I was considering P1 instead.
Fortunately I only recently acquired the 3rd gen devices for a project. ±10 Xenon's and couple of Argon's that need to work together to manage our mixing system in our Coffee Roastery. So far much smoother ride than when we tried this with NodeMCU+ESP8266 combo.
I am mostly posting data to Ubidots and seems to be without incident so far. I would guess the most strain I have put on a Photon was with a current sensor project where I am taking ±800 readings per second, calculating average and then publishing to Ubidots (1 per second) to get as close to "Real time data" as I can. Not sure if I can push it even further, but this seems to be sufficient for now.
I still have to learn this... haha. Being in tech for quite a bit of time I know there can be teething problems which I am ok to go through. I guess as long as I have an honest relationship with the supplier, I value that enough to stick. I agree with the rest... doing my best to learn C in a proper manner to avoid future challenges. Just so much to learn... C, Eagle, Fusion... 
As I mentioned I am quite new to IoT but an eager learner and enjoying this a lot, much more than IT. My responses to posts are in the hope to help 'fellow newbies' with some of the challenges I faced when starting. As you mentioned, nothing worse than waiting time on trying to make something work that just won't do.
hahaha... thanks!!! Enjoy 