The flaws that did this car in can be attributed in part to Bricklin being a bit too clever for his own good.

The doors were too heavy to make any sense as a gullwing design, and there wasn't any reason to have them other than the cool factor. They were heavy for a reason: They were reinforced to protect against side-impact collisions. The poster-child up to that time for the gullwing-door design was Mercedes-Benz with the 300SL, and the later C111 prototypes. The difference is that MB's gullwing doors were actually a kludge of sorts: The passenger cell sat low enough within the frame that the side sills were comparatively large. Owing to the coupe's shape as aerodynamics was a factor, a conventional door design was physically impossible to use (with no roof to be concerned about, the roadsters didn't have this problem). In addition, MB saw potential pitfalls with this design and made the doors of aluminum rather than the steel of the main bodyshell, taking advantage of the lighter weight benefiting the rest of the car in the process (the hood and trunk were likewise aluminum).

The technology involved in making the body panels out of plastic was cobbled together from a bunch of great individual ideas that didn't work when used together. The only other car in the US at that time with a non-metal body was the Corvette. While the idea of using fiberglass for car bodies was new when GM first designed the Corvette in the 1950s, the process used "conventional" fiberglass composition and manufacturing techniques (glass mat and resin) because GM was shooting to kill with "America's Sports Car". By the time the Bricklin was on the drawing board, GM refined this with sheet-molded compound, but this was strictly a manufacturing process; the materials were the same. Bricklin was, in contrast, using a clear acrylic layer on top of fiberglass. You know how you can like potatoes and you can like ice cream, but you wouldn't want them mixed together? Same thing. The acrylic would delaminate (pull away from the fiberglass), and would also let UV light through allowing material degradation.

I don't know that fixing these things prior to production would have in any way guaranteed success for the Bricklin--since it was a unique product from a unique company, other unforeseen issues may have contributed to the car's demise--but Malcolm Bricklin was a risk-taker who was able to get some decent seed money together to bring his ideas to fruition. Bricklin was American but secured several million in Canadian government loans in return for building the cars in New Brunswick while also taking advantage of cheaper labor (in an interesting example of past-is-prologue, John Delorean would use the same scheme to build his gullwing sports car in Ireland a few years later).