I'm wondering what the intended use case is. If the idea is to fill it up with ODDs, I think slim bays would make more sense since you'd have better density. If the use case is to put a bunch of drive cages in it, the problem is by the time you add up the price of all those cages, you've spent more than if you had just bought a secondhand server/workstation chassis and didn't even get backplane management or any of that.
What might make it a decent budget option would be to also sell some cheap non-hotswap bay converters, so that it becomes a cheap "lots of hard drives but I don't care about the bells and whistles" case.