>If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot.
Honestly that's the normal way to do product design, start with the expensive version that works and then slowly redevelop it to use cheaper parts, or make big enough purchases that the cost of the parts naturally comes down.
I get that you were involved in the project, and won't hear of any criticism, but people serious about shipping instead of tinkerers would have done things differently, and there is no reason to deny or get upset about that.
Evidently the normal way to do product design failed at producing consumer 3-D printers, as it invariably fails at big innovations, so in those cases people have to be tinkerers to be serious about shipping. Clayton Christensen has a book about this you might be interested in reading.
Humanity is not one subject. It is multitude of objects and subjects. The best analogy is loose coupled network (each active node have ~10..100 connections, and billions passive objects with 1..3 connections).
Because of this, we could talk only about some subjects, who directly interested in use opportunities and have all need for this activity.
Even if use relatively conservative approach and consider only formally declared countries as subjects, we will have about 200 subjects (plus some active and successful humans - for example, in business usually considered 80% value of company is good CEO). If we look slightly deeper, we will see some trans-national subjects, like G7, G20, ITU, and many regional subjects. And you should understand me right, before We (I and You) create some at least voice agreement, we cannot consider any subject "we".
Yes, exists "invisible power of market", and some other similar things, like libido, but they all are unconscious powers, and you cannot expect for them to do conscious decisions and conscious things.
My "we" claim, specifically, was, "Before going down the rabbit holes, we didn't know which ones were unnecessary." Out of the multitude of objects and subjects that you name, none knew which of the rabbit holes RepRap went down were unnecessary. Some of them had some beliefs about it, but those beliefs were unjustified, and most of them were evidently wrong, so they did not constitute "knowledge" as commonly understood.
Therefore the diversity of humanity, the ITU, libido, and so on, are irrelevant to my claim.
Ex ante, there was nothing distinguishing the proposition that a usable 3-D printer needed precision-ground leadscrews from the proposition that a usable 3-D printer needed a heated build plate. By trying hard to do without, we found that the first one was false but the second one probably true.
Sounds like the US wanted to make the Soviet Union its colony, limiting its technical progress, but failed. Possibly, if they'd succeeded, they would have nuked Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, etc.) in the 70s or 80s, confident they could track and sink all the Soviet submarines before they could launch a retaliatory salvo. Or possibly not; they might not have had a way to disable the other two legs of the nuclear triad, or not been confident in it. Or perhaps they would have hesitated to initiate a nuclear war in any case.
Honestly that's the normal way to do product design, start with the expensive version that works and then slowly redevelop it to use cheaper parts, or make big enough purchases that the cost of the parts naturally comes down.
I get that you were involved in the project, and won't hear of any criticism, but people serious about shipping instead of tinkerers would have done things differently, and there is no reason to deny or get upset about that.