If I waited until printers were completely fool-proof, I would never have gotten one. Instead I jumped in 6yrs ago and I’ve printed so many useful things and a lot of toys. Most rooms in my house have at least one printed item in them because of how useful it is.

Yes I’ve had my share of failures and have had to rebuild a printer a ton of times while learning how it worked, but I also learned a lot of new skills.

• Soldering used to be scary and now it’s no big deal.
• I can de-pin connectors and build new adapters instead of spending $8-10 for someone to ship me one from Amazon.
• With TinkerCAD I can knock out roughly designed parts that are ready to go in a few hours instead of waiting days/weeks

From learning all of those skills I’ve swapped the motherboard and rewired my first printer to have bed levelling and be whisper quiet, 3d printed an RC car, designed parts for my vehicles, completely overhauled my sim racing setup, the list goes on.

If you want to get in to it and have the money to get started, go for it. I started with something like an Ender 3 and still use it today. You don’t need an expensive machine if you want to learn how to maintain it. It all depends on what your goal is with 3d printing.

I hope you aren’t running abs in an area you will spend time in. It stinks and is very finicky to print. I switched to petg and never looked back. I still have two rolls in their boxes I’m never going to use.

I have two i3 clones and fully agree the first month or so was just tweaking the machine and printing parts to improve quality.

My Monoprice Duplicator i3 Plus from 2017 is still going after a LOT of tinkering. My Anycubic Chiron is more or less stock for better and worse. The z-wobble on both is about that last thing I need to do for quality improvements but I’m lazy.

I have a photon mono 4k that has been quite nice. I could use a bigger build plate but I like what I have.

What are the specs of the machine? How hard is it working to run those services? Both of those could be run on a raspberry pi for low usage but then you need to learn linux if you aren’t already using it.

If it’s under powered and working hard all the time it will draw more power and generate more heat.

Does it need to live in your office?

What is your use case for the printer? That might help inform your decision.

A Prusa is a pretty safe pick and more or less fire and forget from what I’ve seen.

I have older printers that are reliable after numerous upgrades (including a new board and adding auto-leveling) for larger parts and a resin printer for detailed stuff.