Hahaa, it did come out pretty black and white, didn't it. :-) I was mainly referring to the observation that while digital manufacturing in general is consider

Hahaa, it did come out pretty black and white, didn't it. :-) I was mainly referring to the observation that while digital manufacturing in general is considered the 3rd industrial revolution it's 3D printing in particular that's driving it. Also, if it didn't come across I really like CNC machining and I think it will have an important part in manufacturing for years to come. 1. Limitations on geometry The set of shapes that can reasonably be machined certainly contains a lot of useful items. However, the limitations that the machining process places on the design are subtle to learn and sometimes limit the process fundamentally. Of the examples you mention dental implants and jewelry are actually rapidly moving to 3D printing specifically because of geometry limitations. As an example pretty much all hearing aids are nowadays 3D printed. The geometry limitations are mostly driving adoption of 3D printing in high end applications like human implants, aircrafts, complex machine parts etc. 2. Tooling cost I think there is a slight misunderstanding. Tooling cost does not refer to the cost of the tool but to the cost of changing the configuration of that tool from manufacturing item A to manufacturing item B. For machining centers that cost is very high, think of it as the work you go through when you switch milling bits, workpiece holding, alignment etc. For 3D printers that cost is virtually zero. As for material choices I have several copies of the croco fob in question printed in steel. They were ordered through a 3D printing service and costed about $30 per piece. Aside from the fact that the croco fob can't be milled there is nowhere I could order three of them for that price. 3. CAD software/Tinkercad We could certainly add CNC toolpaths but there is a lot more people who want to 3D print than mill. Given how easy it's to 3D print through one of the printing services compared to the hassle of going through a machine shop I can't really blame them. The main benefits of CNC toolpath generation would be home machinists, like myself, who could then use Tinkercad. That group of people is pretty small. People can draw things and make a machine make them already. This is the part where we disagree. Or more properly I think your definition of people is a few magnitudes smaller than my definition of it. To use your analogy, machining is like plotting and 3D printing is like raster (matrix) printing. I think calling it an implementation detail is missing the point.