People who are hacking in the free time often go towards hacking on things that are fun and interesting. When 3D printing appeared, it was (still is) immensely

People who are hacking in the free time often go towards hacking on things that are fun and interesting. When 3D printing appeared, it was (still is) immensely fun and interesting; "printing your own physical objects?!". On the other hand you have 2D printing on paper, which is nowhere near as fun and interesting, so you have less people gravitating towards hacking on 2D printing software and hardware. Granted, a few FOSS giants are obviously maintaining the stack, which is amazing. Same with programming languages for example. You give a developer unlimited free time to learn whatever language they want, they'll probably either go for a language that was newly released and hyped (like Rust) or something obscenely old (like COBOL), probably won't spend time learning PHP or Perl which are too old to be new but too new to be old.