Hi Diane,
We’re tried very hard to make something good in this area, but if you asked how many tries it takes to make a working lightbulb, I couldn’t answer that. I can give you some background information to help you understand the process. Some things take far longer than anybody ever planned for or wanted.
Pheromones and copulins are completely different chemical structures.
Copulins are more in the realm of perfuming, than they are pheromones (which are created by hormone chemists). While we know a little bit about perfuming, we focus more on how perfuming chemicals work w/pheromones than on actual scents. i.e., all our work is very pheromone-centric. Actual scent and scent technology we tend to outsource most of that work to experts in their own fields.
Unlike pheromoning, perfuming itself is an old, established industry with a lot of the research and art already well known. We expect the leaders in established industries to do a good job at their chosen art & science, so we can focus put the bulk of our effort into what we do best. We don’t want to waste time re-inventing the wheel.
That said, we did make our own plant based version of copulins a few years back (since almost no one perfumes with actual raw plant oils), and that was OK with us. The problem is that plant based product can cause skin sensitization (skin rashes, etc.).
Paid a few people to make non-sensitizing versions of copulins, and we haven’t found most of those versions to be really acceptable.
Mind you, asking someone who deals with flower and musk notes to make copulins is sort of a “weird” request. (!!)
Some of what they produced may have been better than what other companies have, and perhaps superior to “salad dressing gone bad” formulas on the market, but we don’t care about that. We have high internal standards, and it really has to be good enough to us to release even as a test mix.
I know it takes a long time to do some things right, but we don’t ever want to be the kind of institute people point to and say “They have no shame”. We may be very “experimental” here, but we don’t use that word to cover as a substitute for quality. We’re not going to intentionally release anything that we already know to be substandard, which is why we’ve rejected most copulin formulas we’ve had done.
The good news is, as you may have read elsewhere on the forum, we have a yet another perfumer on it. I like this guy. He’s kind and level headed, and makes some really amazing scents. I even have the sneaking suspicion that’s he’s heterosexual (rare in the world of male perfumers, Luca Turin exempted) and may know what good copulins smell like. Important stuff.
The EXTRA good news is that he might join the forum here, so he can develop it “live” on in response to feedback from all you guys, as we do with pheromone formulas. We couldn’t get that kind of involvement from most perfumers or even salad dressing designers if we tried.
There’s possibly even EXTRA EXTRA good news, but I’ll leave that for later.
Kindly, 
Jas