What makes a breakeven ad spend strategy "dumbo" and an ad management tool "skanky"?

First let's define breakeven. I mean TACOS, so takes into account organic sales as well. And beyond launch which you mention, getting a follow-on effect is the only thing that could be worth it. That simply is unlikely to happen reliably through the year, especially with scalers. Exception being deep in Q4 perhaps.

There is also the provable issue that AMS does not respect the highest bid. It rations out impressions and it makes you pay more for listings like new ones that it doesn't "trust".

Text only designs/light graphic designs outsell graphic only/mainly designs at least 1000 to 1. I bet you'd be hard pressed to even find many graphic only designs with a sub 100k bsr that aren't licensed/branded.

Such statistics simply reflect the fact that text only is mainly what merchers do, not what would be the case if they did in fact concentrate on graphic only/mainly.

they're more difficult/take far more time for a novice designer, cost more if you're outsourcing

Yeah you gotta keep selling that merch bro 2017 dream to the n00bies to keep them in the guru marketing funnels. Make text designs on your phone and get rich! Except that doesn't work now.

Unless you have a validated concept, putting that much effort into a single design is unlikely to be much of an roi.

You mean unless you stole a niche or phrase from someone else because that is the basis of the improvecat method. But I agree the ROI isn't there in general which is why people shouldn't outsource to so-called "designers" and instead learn to do it themselves.

When you spout stuff like this it makes you sound like you haven't actually sold very much on Amazon and you're just angry at everyone.

LOL yeah sure dude. You are just the latest in a years long line of shovel and jeans sellers and their nuthuggers on reddit to call me angry or toxic. Here, one of them made this years ago. Go buy it and wear it.

https://www.amazon.com/nimitz34-love/dp/B07PXLGV5D

Now I'll address why your tool in particular is skanky. First it starts off being you offer aff coms to skanky/scummy MBA gurus to promote it. Second it's been around for years and you haven't been particularly successful with it. Third the opaque way you charge for it with customers having to buy usage tokens which is the same as charging a cut of adspend.

Most importantly it is a substandard tool in the PPC space, just one niched down to AMOD/MBA. And none of them work particularly well on autopilot even with "rules" vs constant manual attention. Your feature set is a crippled version of every major tool out there. Source: people I know who have used other such major tools vs your feature set, and the PPC channel of the FBA discord which I lurk and where I often read about such tools.

Oh wait before I finish I have to ask this. Why without my mentioning you or your tool did you immediately think I was referring to same with the "skanky" remark? HAHAHAHA.