The reason I buy coffee at a coffee shop is because I want it done properly, and "properly" is largely a subjective thing. A good shop will have someone who's i

The reason I buy coffee at a coffee shop is because I want it done properly, and "properly" is largely a subjective thing. A good shop will have someone who's intimately familiar with what they're preparing and will tune the machine at multiple times per day to get the right result. A robot just does what it's told. Starbucks used to have manual machines and the results were...variable. Some days you'd get a substandard drink, but if you got someone who knew what they were doing, the results were fantastic. It's like before the coffee would be anywhere beteween a 6 and 9 out of 10. Now they're consistently 7.5 out of 10 every time. Boring, predictable, never bad, but never great.