That sounds extremely different from my local hacker space. Every time I visit, there's a crowd of people from high school students to retirees building stuff

That sounds extremely different from my local hacker space. Every time I visit, there's a crowd of people from high school students to retirees building stuff and most of them are happy/excited to tell you all about their new project. Despite 5 Prusa, 1 Formlabs SLA and 1 SLS, you usually have to make an appointment or wait for you chance at printing. The laser cutter and CNC are mostly idle, though. The talks that others offered were postmortems about building something and one guy gave a lecture on how he patented and commercialised his own milk frother design. Another project was CNCing the clips for leather bicycle luggage bags. After a while, the regulars added a really nice café corner so that you can comfortably gossip a bit away from all the machine noise.