Thanks for the comments.
mshilarious: I'm already working on a new board design with SMT parts, bigger board to PCB mount the XLRs, and basically anything to save time and labor. And yes, I find SMT labor costs are cheaper than TH labor costs.
freelunch: I'll keep a list, good idea.
And just think, you don't even have customers dogging you for support yet.
Not true. I've been in the kit business for 1-1/2 years now, sold A LOT of kits and supported several hundred customers via my forum and email. So it's not like I'm new to the game. And I think kits are even more harder to support, asnswering build questions, customer problems, troubleshooting via email, etc...
Re: TS-2
My original plan is to hand solder the first few units, and take notes of where the major inefficiencies are in the assembly. Little things like connection wires and flying leads that is not an issue doing one unit, becomes major and takes a lot of time when doing several units.
So one of the major changes I'll be doing is using PCB mounted XLRs in the future, and finding a pin & socket solution to mate the switchboard with the mainboard. My distributor representative dropped off personally at my house some catalogs to look at.
Soldering the parts is not the hard/time consuming part for me.
It's stripping wires and putting them in each hole that slows me down and is a pain. (And I'm already using Thermal wire strippers, which already saves me a lot of work.) If I can reduce or eliminate this wiring part, I'm going to be better.