[silversmith]

That used to be the case. Less so now - the Chinese brands tend to work right out of the box.

I run an Elegoo Centauri Carbon ar home, and the building and managing process was unscrewing couple transport bolts and clicking "self calibrate" button. From what I've seen, Creality is the same way now too.

Yes, the old Ender 3 I used to have demanded attention every other print. But it's not the norm now.

I'm sure Prusa makes a better product, and it probably starts to make economic sense if you run a print farm. But for home use, a 300€ box that happily melts plastic into whatever shape I need is a sweet deal. It even has a 50€ multi material extension box now, however that's on months long backorder.

[DoctorOetker]

do these alternatives all share the same pattern of providing cloud services like BambuLabs?

[silversmith]

As far as I know, Elegoo is offline. It has not asked me to log in anywhere, and while it encourages use of their own orcaslicer skin, it works with others too.