My guy, first off: the current most powerful printer is the T250, which is 100% open-source. Secondly: Neither Printables (Prusa) nor Thingiverse (Ultimaker) needs a registration for people to download stuff. Not defending Thingiverse or Ultimaker, they definitely also did shit. But that doesn’t mean you have to step right into it (unless you’re into such things). Prusa also made some weird choices (by far not as much as others though). Thirdly: even modern printers with fancy new tech like toolhead switching can and are being build with Klipper as their control software (Snapmaker U1), and Sovol based their company around offering easy-to-use printers with off-the-shelf parts closely based on Voron designs. And I probably don’t need to explain how Prusa operates. None of them are perfect kof course, but there’s zero need for the kind of enshittification Bambu and Creality now stand for.

These cheap hobby printers went nowhere until Bambu started up.

You’re deluded. There’s nothing special about Bambu printers, except perhaps their (by now) awful failure rate and printer recalls. Although it might indeed be special to build printers where the hotend successfully melts itself, the newest problems with the A1 (not the first time Bambu printers are suffering from thermal runaway due to bad thermistors, literally the most dangerous failure there is). The one thing they do like a pro is marketing and capturing marketshare by selling underpriced hardware with increasingly closed software through influencer campaigns.

To call everything that already existed when Bambu was created “cheap hobby printers” is just absurd.

All 3D printing that is practical is backed by VC.

Rofl, so Prusa printers aren’t practical. Noted.