The problem with the distro model is that financially, it doesn't work.
One makes a tiny profit margin on tiny sales, and so to make money, must cut corners: 1 - by trading crap CDs for others and selling the CD of the week hard while ignoring quality stuff 2 - by skimping on packaging, postage, employee costs and insurance 3 - by spending as little time as possible on getting it right.
This problem isn't unique to Supernal. Most distros are not worth using, but they offer "great underground prices." And all the smart guys out there rush in, and barely notice when they get ripped off.
This is nothing new. If you look at the distros from the underground days, e.g. pre-Relapse, they were all run at higher costs ($15-17/CD) and still were done mostly for the love of the genre. No one took home profits except the metalcore profiteers (Relapse, CM, NB, etc).
When we started Evilmusic, our goal was to be the best distro possible, which meant keeping a full stock of quality items and shipping them professionally. Two things went wrong: 1, the underground didn't want to pay for it, and we lacked the will to go full-on into it with expensive advertising, and 2, the audience shifted under us such that the up and coming buyers no longer cared about quality but wanted the band of the week crap.
If you want to know why half of the metal community buys through amazon.com, that's why.