What were the disadvantages of early prop driven blended-wing aircraft? I've been researching the history of pre-jet aircraft and I've come across several famous, and not so famous, blended-wing aircraft. The idea seemed to show promise but never really caught on, even for a limited span of time or confluence of technological factors e.g. weight vs engine power etc. 

Just to be clear, I'm not interest in flying wing and/or tailless aircraft whose early problems are well known, but rather those designs that have tails but have a fuselage shaped to produced a significant component of lift. 

Just a few of the designs I've stumbled across:

Burnelli CBY-3

Cunliffe-Owen OA-1 (Burnelli license)

French de Monge 7.4 

Soviet LK-1 a.k.a. Fanera-2

There are quite a few more I don't have handy web links for. Junkers did a couple that would probably qualify.

The large number of designs from all over the world show that the basic idea offered promise but all the designs eventually went no where despite being tried in many countries, economies and even political systems. That in turn seems strange because in the 1920s-early-1940s, lift seemed more important than speed for larger multiengine aircraft i.e. just getting a load airborne at all was worth quite a few other tradeoffs. As engines grew more powerful that tradeoff lessened but for at least 15-20 years a high lift design should have been more desirable than a high speed one for larger aircraft. 

The failure of many different designers over the course of three decades to make the blended wing work suggest to me that the basic idea has some inherent disadvantage/s that outweighed any gains. Unfortunately, none of the resources I have consulted offer any clues to why the designs did not "take off."

I suspect the designs showed some rapid onset of stall of instabilty but that's just an uninformed hunch on my part. 

Any clues?
Generally, to create lift means to deflect the oncoming airstream downwards. How and where this is done in detail on an airplane is less important than doing it with a smooth spanwise lift distribution such that the wake behind the aircraft is trough-shaped.
A fuselage is disturbing this lift distribution, but not severely. The length of the fuselage means that it creates considerable lift at small incidences, even with the low lift slope of slender bodies. In case of the N-250 it was found that an incidence of 2° produces the lowest drag. However, this also means that the lift is only just right at one angle of attack, and when the aircraft is flown in different conditions, the fuselage can mess up the lift distribution quite easily, especially if it is wider than necessary.
During the 1930s and 40s, when this was understood in detail not only in academia, but also in the design offices, progress in engine technology pushed operating altitudes up until planes needed pressurized cabins to transport passengers comfortably. Pressurisation demands a round or nearly-round fuselage cross section to keep structural mass down, so any attempt at widening and shaping the fuselage would result in an unacceptable mass penalty. This ended the experimentation with lift-creating fuselages.
As for the N-250, the idea of fuselage inclination in cruise is correct in theory, but resulted in massive protests from the cabin crew which now had to push their carts uphill, ending this kind of optimization quickly. This is why it never caught on.