All of those suggestions have big downsides. I'm friends with the scientific glassblower that works at the university I attended and I'm somewhat familiar with

All of those suggestions have big downsides. I'm friends with the scientific glassblower that works at the university I attended and I'm somewhat familiar with the work he does. A large part of his job is constructing custom equipment for specific tasks. A big part of this is figuring out what the user really needs or is trying to do. The glassblower has more experience than most of the people asking for equipment to be made. He'll often work with them to improve their initial design. You wouldn't get this if you were just sending off an order to a company to have custom glass made. Another important part of his job is repairing equipment when it breaks. If you break an important piece of equipment in your lab are you willing to wait for it to be packed, shipped to China, fixed, and shipped back? Broken equipment may have been used to hold hazardous chemicals and there is often chemical residue on the glass. Most people in a lab wouldn't be able to clean the glass well enough to make it shippable without the equipment in the glassblower's office. I don't think anyone has done any work on 3d printing glass. Even if you could 3d print glass that doesn't address the problems with poor design and repairing broken equipment. It's possible to do without a glassblower but not a good idea for a top tier research university. If you can't get custom glass made then you can't do certain experiments. Not being able to do those experiments could lead to problems recruiting faculty and students that want to do them.