I thought the classes were pretty helpful and a pretty good deal, considering they had a maximum capacity of a few students at a time. I’m sure the instructors

I thought the classes were pretty helpful and a pretty good deal, considering they had a maximum capacity of a few students at a time. I’m sure the instructors were only making peanuts out of it. I didn’t have any trouble getting into class slots at the SF location, when I was trying to do it a couple years ago. The bigger problem for me was that equipment was under some contention, meaning that it took signing up for a particular (maybe 2 hour) block of time a couple days in advance. I was trying to prototype things and learn basic stuff at the same time, which meant that my original computer designs were typically wrong the first few tries, and I wanted to do several rounds of iterative improvements to my designs. That is: 10 minutes of cutting, followed by 30 minutes of fiddling with a computer program or vector file, followed by 10 more minutes of cutting, etc. With a 2 hour block of time it’s only possible to get through 3 feedback cycles in that style, after which I sometimes had to wait a few days to try again at a time that would fit in my schedule. I would have been dramatically more efficient if I could have shared a 6 hour block of time with 3–4 other people.