Indeed I suspect FDM is good enough for a significant hunk of use cases as you’re outlining.
As FDM printing evolves the number of use cases it cannot solve seems to be shrinking. Probably we need to get into physics requirements to cover the requirements that FDM does not solve these days. Which is great, it makes general plastics manufacturing super accessible to the masses when we can arrive at this. I wish there was a general FAQ thing available people would be able to use to determine what manufacturing process would be necessary at the product planning phase. Because I feel like if people knew that they could just 3D print plastics at scale that a lot more people would be willing to innovate in the hardware space, which is a space well known as being difficult to enter and fraught with all sorts of monetary and regulatory land mines.
As FDM printing evolves the number of use cases it cannot solve seems to be shrinking. Probably we need to get into physics requirements to cover the requirements that FDM does not solve these days. Which is great, it makes general plastics manufacturing super accessible to the masses when we can arrive at this. I wish there was a general FAQ thing available people would be able to use to determine what manufacturing process would be necessary at the product planning phase. Because I feel like if people knew that they could just 3D print plastics at scale that a lot more people would be willing to innovate in the hardware space, which is a space well known as being difficult to enter and fraught with all sorts of monetary and regulatory land mines.