TrapRag

That’s correct. Creality jumped in the game after and took advantage of a lot of the work prusa and the open source community did to make printers much more affordable with the ender series. That drew a lot more people into the community like myself, but nowadays I’d say steer clear of them for a number of reasons.

Bonus history, Naomi Wu is/was a huge maker from China who was able to push development on the cr-30 print mill. The print mill is almost literally just a small tread mill with the gantry on an angle that “shines” in batch printing and theoretically infinitely long parts. From my experience though its even finickier than an old ender and poses some additional design considerations. I think it’s super cool conceptually though and very satisfying to get successful parts off of, but could really only recommend to enthusiasts with lots of time and disposable income.

Unless you have lots of technical skills and patience i wouldn’t recommend it especially not for a first printer… but something worth considering down the road for the open source aspect would be a voron.

The Voron team has designed a few different printer variations and released the bill of materials and software documentation for you to source all the parts needed to build a printer from the ground up. Companies on Ali express sell kits to make it a little easier and cheaper but again, you are building it from the ground up.

If that sounds interesting I would still highly recommend starting with something a little cheaper like the elegoo CC (1 or 2) to get used to printing and see how much you like it.

Whatever you decide is right for you though I hope you and your wife really enjoy the hobby!

Looks like theres some other advice I’d try first but have you checked/calibrated the e-steps?

Esteps are easy to check, use a fine scale or calipers and a sharpie to mark the filament 100 & 110mm before it enters the hot end and then jog the extruder 100mm and measure how much it has actually extruded.

Tutorial here that covers pretty much every way to cal the steps but I suggest skipping from the set up down to the calculation and then to the “cowboy method” all3dp.com/…/extruder-calibration-calibrate-e-ste…

If that doesn’t seem to be the culprit you could try keeping an eye on it when you have time to see if material keeps oozing a little when the nozzle reaches the end of a tool path or during a travel. If so you can try tinkering with coasting and retraction settings. If defects seem to occur more during travels there are settings to avoid traveling over printed areas or you can try enabling z-hops.