I sympathize with your disappointment, but I'm honestly not surprised by what happened. I never expected much to come from it except for introducing a few more

I sympathize with your disappointment, but I'm honestly not surprised by what happened. I never expected much to come from it except for introducing a few more people to light manufacturing. The reason is that the people who were already going to do this (actual mechanical engineers and machinists) had a path forward: buying used CNC machinery and starting up in their garages. And many of them did/are doing this, but it's not the kind of thing that's discussed unless you are on a manufacturing forum, which HN definitely is not. Part of the problem is that if you're going to make a living doing it, you need professional quality tools that can run all day, every day. "Maker" level tooling won't do that.