The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves

Compared to my home setup, (manual flair espresso press), most coffee shop espresso machines are quite a bit more automated. But I don’t begrudge them that automation, their arms would get too sore. And nobody is paying me to manually press my lever.

It doesn’t seem like a neat mapping.

Learning a skill and practicing it is still extremely enjoyable, even if a machine (or a factory) could do it better, faster, cheaper. The point is not the product, but the process.

Somewhat off topic from the rest of the comments but:

Knew someone who was in the Jane Austen Society (New York City chapter). She told me how a member from the Melbourne (as in Australia) chapter was visiting NYC, had never been there and so reached out to the NYC chapter to see if people wanted to hang out.

After the hang out, my friend says: "OMG, she was one of the coolest and most fun people I've ever met! So much fun to take someone else from JAS around NYC for their first time"

This is one of my favorite stories about how a community can grow out of an interest in something and then span the globe. Cool to see the same thing is true of 40k

I got started in 2017 with an Ender 3, and extremely cheap printer with a basic set of features. I improved it by adding a bed leveling sensor and flashing new firmware, along with adding a tool steel nozzle and heater, and a 3d printed housing replacement for it's screen which included a place to mount a raspberry pi, running octoprint, to manage it remotely, and a webcam on a stick mounted to the Z rail. It worked pretty good, and building it was fun.

However in the intervening years, I also bought a Creality CR-6 Max, a much larger printer with a built-in bed leveler. It too got a pi and a webcam, but nothing beyond that, and it too worked well. However both those printers required constant maintenance, troubleshooting and overall fiddling. It remained my niche hobby.

I've since upgraded to a Bambu Lab H2D at great expense ($3,200 retail, utterly dwarfing the sub-$500 printers of before) and honestly, it's like a different tech all together. I don't even NEED a computer, really, unless I want to use one: I can find stuff on my phone, download it, and send it to the printer over their cloud service. And no troubleshooting really to speak of, I think I've had like 3 prints that did some weird shit and required a figure or two, but absolutely no comparison to the other machines. And in fact it's so bulletproof that my wife, who is utterly uninterested and frankly a bit hostile to tech, now uses it more than I do. She says it's a slightly trickier version of a Cricut, which is just WILD to me coming from my experiences with the Ender and Creality before it.

All of these are of course FDM printers. I have also played with a Photon Mono X I got from a friend who didn't want to use it with their birds in their home, and that one while requiring more fiddling and more chemicals, is also virtually bulletproof with regard to print quality, and you get better finishes with some tradeoffs (vulnerability to sunlight, figuring out curing vs. over-curing, what have you) which sounds a bit more like what you were dealing with. I could absolutely see that souring your opinion if you started there, that's not a beginner machine IMHO.

I would never recommend a resin printer to someone new to 3D printing. They’ve come a long way and are reasonably reliable now, but it’s not a good place to start.