I lost faith in Makerbot when they started using proprietary parts that, as far as I could tell, weren’t actually superior to the open source equivalents. I ran

I lost faith in Makerbot when they started using proprietary parts that, as far as I could tell, weren’t actually superior to the open source equivalents. I ran a print farm for a while with 50 printers of various brands and the bottom line is that if you FDM print a lot, stuff is going to break or go wrong regardless of the printer price or brand. Being able to easily (and cheaply) source parts and replace things yourself is essential. I will always applaud them for Thingiverse, though. I feel like the story is a bit different in the SLA world, but I got out of 3D printing before it got really popular.