Interesting.

I come at this from the other direction. I was your stereotypical guitar-playing, photographer, software nerd; I would never have tried making physical things until I realised I wanted to make photography accessories.

(Also some of my experience with expensive machines has been very spendy inkjet printers.)

But I also want to teach (adults) and I have therefore developed a tendency to teach myself anything I am interested in at enough of a level that I could teach someone newer to it.

There are just too many sketchy things around Bambu for me to take them seriously.

I will concede I am using a budget Creality, and that almost none of the alternative players have the strongest reputation for open source ethics, so it is a narrowed field.

But I can see myself buying a Snapmaker, a Prusa, or a Sovol, on the budget fringes the newer Flashforge printers are shockingly good, and for the entry level I don't massively mind what Anycubic are doing with the Kobra X; it's not heavy duty but potentially has some applications.

I don't think I'd buy a Creality again. But it's in no way because of my experience with them or with the machine I bought or its upgrades; this experience has been in very significant ways a life-changing one.

I just don't think they appear to be better at doing the more closed products than they were at the dirt cheap stuff (industry-changing machines for which they catch undue shit), and they turn over new products too fast.

Where I am more challenged is CNC.

I definitely don't know how I feel here, because on the one hand I'd like a large-ish MPCNC or scrappy eBay CNC to rough out lap steel guitars and conversion necks; big coarse-ish-but-accurate woodcutting I am bad at by hand. And on the other hand, for the photography stuff in particular, I have definite applications for a Carvera Z1.

I guess the answer may be to do both. But the same process of assessment will be involved in this case.