After some searching, we found what we were after: A local supplier here in Germany who has some quantity of different models, including a large number of ALPS 3.5" 1.44MB drives.
Wow, so it sounds like they actually had to go with used drives. I was thinking maybe they got lucky and found some unsold NOS ones in an old warehouse or something. No such luck. But at least they found something to let them move forward with the project.
It does lead me to wonder though: How many floppy drives would one have to commit to ordering, and how much would it cost, to get a company to manufacture a run of such devices?
There’s some interesting reading from the creator of a Mac Floppy emulator on sourcing the obscure (DB19) connector it uses - and his setting out I do a new production run. This [1] is kind of in the middle of the thread - but still interesting reading:
Searching the linked development blog yields this: https://c65gs.blogspot.com/2019/03/floppys-floppys-everywher...
After some searching, we found what we were after: A local supplier here in Germany who has some quantity of different models, including a large number of ALPS 3.5" 1.44MB drives.