For home users, 3D printing fills the same niche as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or AI art: it's a way to get a toy project complete without having to learn much of anything. You could learn actual design and machining (and there's way more you can do on a cheap and crappy little Chinese minimill or minilathe than you'd think), you could learn actual electronics and useful PIC microcontroller programming, you could enrich yourself and learn the fundamentals of art... but nah, you'll just rely on something you downloaded and slightly tweaked to reach a "good enough" solution.
Yes I am making a blanket statement about 3d printing plastics, in general. So what is the print speed for any of the 3d printing methods for a modestly complex 3"x3"x3" envelope part? if your answer is anything more than a couple of minutes, it's useless for industry. Is it more than 30 minutes? It's useless for someone with access to manual machine tools (not because the machining is the time bottleneck but the setup and indication of the part). What plastics are we limited to with 3D printing? Mostly resins and styrene derivatives which are some of the most mechanically useless plastics out there. Nylon is a pain to 3d print with and you can't glass reinforce it in a print, reducing its acceptable use case scenarios dramatically.
That DIY laser sintering setup is a messy kit, looks like the sort of thing that makerspaces buy as a toy and everyone forgets about after a month or so, has a uselessly small work envelope, and the laser is 5 or 10 watts depending on configuration. This is all pointless because this is a PLASTIC LASER SINTERING PRINTER WHICH IS THE DUMBEST GODDAMNED THING I'VE EVER SEEN. I was talking about metal sintering so good job on failing to read the actual machine specs.
I'm talking about useful machines like a DMG Mori Lasertec 125 which is a mid-tier machine that laser sinters actual metal which is the whole PURPOSE OF A USEFUL LASER SINTERING """PRINTER"""". When you get into machinery like this the prices are not listed publicly so, for shits and giggles, I called the machinery dealer I use for my own shop to get a ballpark estimate (and to give them a late day laugh). Their answer was "$1.35 million estimated, probably a 7% discount if ordering multiple machines. We'd have to run a proper quote by DMG Mori to have a real answer." It's almost as if a machine with 10x the work envelope, a 2000 watt laser, and the ability to sinter real metal to make actual useful parts is, as I noted before, unattainably expensive for normal people. We will also ignore the fact that a real machine will probably require also 440v three phase power and a very large space to hold a machine that is probably 8' or 9' tall, based on the height of the control console. I can't get the exact specs because you have to register with DMG Mori for tech specs and I've already wasted too much time and don't care beyond pointing out how dumb 99.99% of hobby 3d printing is, in general, and how stupid you are, even outside of your takes on vtubers.
0.2mm/0.08" accuracy is less accurate than late Victorian age machine tools, let alone contemporary machine tools where a basic dimensional accuracy of .02mm/0.001" is the absolute minimum. I'm a lunatic with a 3 phase setup in his garage and a very large mill and lathe and I can still maintain 0.00025" accuracy on the lathe if I'm not getting fucked by thermal distortion and 0.0005" on the mill even though my DRO is 30 years old and my shop has no climate control to boot.
