I think the point I'm trying to make here is that my printer is bad and old and it works every time, and I attribute that to Prusa Slicer, a free open source piece of software. The Makerbot was a finnicky piece of shit before Prusa Slicer, and now it's excellent and makes dimensionally accurate parts every time, I don't even remember the last time I've had a print fail and I use it all the time, tens of hours of printing per week recently.

The upfront ont-time cost to get to something that works reliably with a non-Bambu printer is real, but I am perhaps naively assuming that if my ancient makerbot has been working reliably for years now the same one time cost can be paid with any modern printer and amortized over hundreds of hours of printing to be nearly negligible, and you still have a reliable printer AND you're voting with your wallet for a better future.

I am not claiming that what I've done is the same as "go to best buy, plug it in and hit print" but I do think the alternative is really really not bad at all.

This isn't "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...". I'm saying "surely if my ancient makerbot is like this with really minimal tuning, a modern non-bambu printer is worth the cost of a bit of extra setup in order to fund people who are improving the space".