It's expensive, but it's also expensive in lots of different avenues. It's not like you can just go "well I'll never buy a big pre-built proprietary printer then I'll just make it myself! Open source forever!" Because that's the road to leads to sourcing and building your own voron from scratch and spending a thousand dollars on parts

I've been amazed at how cheap it's become since I built my first few printers. I spent thousands building printers that aren't half as good as a $300 printer today.

And getting consistent prints at a decent speed can be challenging! (Slow and good vs fast and unreliable is a common choice.)

3D printing can be expensive, but I disagree that it is stupid expensive.

I just bought an elegoo neptune 4 pro and thought about buying more filament already. Hopefully it will only be filament and not more machines or something

But I NEED all the different filament colors @___@

3D printing really isn't expensive, especially since you can create a lot of stuff for cents. I'm considering a new extruder for my Ender 3 (Looking at the LDO orbiter v2) and that's €70, which sounds expensive for the printer, but compared to any other hobby that's peanuts