> Yes, I have used a Prusa, but I have mostly used Cura with it.
You just deprived yourself of any claim to represent the "normal user".
> Not that the comment you're replying to alleges that most Prusa users are using Cura, for the record.
... which kind of shows that they do NOT, in any way, shape, or form, "have to deal with the nightmare of installing and configuring Cura". You're the one who chose to use the words "have to".
> this product design locks it into the enthusiast market, and most consumers don't want to deal with that overhead.
There is not now, nor will there ever be, a significant "non-enthusiast" market for these devices. "Consumers" do not want to dick around with them, and a cloud slicer has negligible impact on most of the dicking around.
> Clicking "print this" on a model catalogue,
How many people actually do that for most of their printing? Who would buy such a device only to use canned models? If I don't want to customize things, I can trivially buy them already made, usually with better quality. I will almost never do better by 3D printing them, at least not if I value my own time at even minimum wage.
I'd say 80 percent of the prints done by the several relatively diverse users in my household are either designed from scratch or significantly modified from whatever we found on the net.
> having it fire up a cloud slicer thing, and pressing "go" is a better user experience for a novice, plain and simple, and I'm sick of arguing with your enlightened enthusiast takes here.
I have a Prusa 3D printer and a Glowforge laser cutter. The Glowforge is a slick, trouble-free device in operation (or at least it will be until its tube inevitably fails). It demands much less tweaking than an FDM printer.
But the "cloud" aspect of the Glowforge user experience is SHARPLY INFERIOR to either connecting the Prusa to your computer or writing files to an SD card.
Even though they obviously put a lot of thought and work into making it as easy as possible, just getting the Glowforge onto the WiFi network and associated with your account is harder than installing the Prusa slicer and getting the printer running. In fact, although I don't claim to represent the average user either, I could probably compile and install Cura from source code with less effort... and I have never touched Cura before.
And now you have an untrustworthy remotely controlled device that can start fires. And if you have any secret designs of your own, you're out of luck. You have no guarantee that the feature set or workflow won't change under you at any time.
You also have Glowforge marketing chirping at you every time you use the damned thing. And you have the software not very subtly trying to push you to buy their overpriced materials. And, no, your average corporation can't keep itself from doing those things. If you adopt a model that drives your company toward obnoxious behavior, the smart money bets that your company will engage in obnoxious behavior, even if you claim it's "optional".
In the case of Glowforge, you also have no way to add your own features... and you have a brick if they ever decide to stop supporting you. I do understand that the the 3D printers you're talking about don't have that problem at the moment, but there will always be pressure on their makers to move in that direction. In fact, when customers complained at the beginning of the preorder period, Glowforge itself promised open source firmware, although not an entire tool chain, as a form of "brick-proofing". As far as I know they've totally failed to deliver open source for any of their own code, nor even enough information about the hardware to let anybody write their own. All they've done is bare minimum GPL compliance for upstream stuff.