alt Hacker NewsNo, it's not a pity, OP should drop this.
1. It was never a business for the reasons you brought up
2. The appeal seems to depend heavily on trademark infringement that would make it even less of a viable business long-term
3. I hate to be mean to OP but the print quality of these products look pretty darn low and undesirable. And yes, I do realize the Celtics photo was an example of a "before" result.
So much of the article talks about the printer breaking down and clogging all the time and it sounds like the author's got some really bad equipment or is otherwise doing something wrong here. 50 orders and 3000 hours of runtime doesn't usually get you busted motors and a major need to have spare parts on hand like the article describes.
That's true, but that could be just his choice of printer. I've got a prusa that has done 100 km of filament (ok, it is the oldest one) and 50 bambus, the bambus are insanely reliable.
Agreed that stuff shouldn't be breaking over that kind of runtime. But the article leaves out a lot of detail that would have helped identifying what is going wrong with the printers, but that's not the main reason this did not work, the main reason is a lack of business sense.