[Retric]

Sure, but automation is not free. Supose you could design a machine to make it twice as fast for 10 million and sell them at 10,000$ a pop. Your world wide market would need to be ~1,000 of them a year which is probably not even close to realistic. You can't really charge more as the hand made approach is reasonably fast and nobody is going to dump 20+K to buy one if it's only saving the, a few hours a week.

PS: Feel free to play with the numbers but there is a reason so much of the world is sill not automated.

[jessaustin]

That explains why this wasn't done back in the industrial age. Lots of people seem to think that manufacturing 3D objects is going to get much easier soon.