As a fairly experienced woodworker, I have another angle on this: the SawStop is a band-aid on the typical American "cabinet saw" design. Cabinet saws (and wor

As a fairly experienced woodworker, I have another angle on this: the SawStop is a band-aid on the typical American "cabinet saw" design. Cabinet saws (and worse, contractor jobsite table saws) invite doing really dumb things re: workholding. That is, how the workpiece being cut is secured before, during, and after the cut. Most of these dumb things are essentially invitations to secure the work using your hands anywhere near the blade. In contrast, variants of sliding table saws are the norm in Europe and elsewhere. These are common in the US as panel saws for cutting sheet goods, but also come in much smaller sizes which are often better for smaller shops and solid wood-based applications. The workholding is different: a slider and a few standard accessories eliminates the need for crosscut sleds, common jigs, and a whole display of gripping-things at your local Woodcraft. The operator stands to the left of the slider, and the blade is to the right – if kickback happens, the operator is entirely out of the line of fire. Likewise, the operator's hands are pushing the slider, not near the blade. Since the work is moved with and/or fixed to the slider this eliminates entire classes of errors that lead to injury. The design difference is profound, akin to the coding philosophy of "make bad states unrepresentable". I'd absolutely prefer a SawStop if I were using a cabinet or contractor saw again, but IMO a sliding table saw is intrinsically safer than a cabinet saw, even with excellent workholding discipline.