This isn't supported by people I've talked to who have owned prior Formlabs printers, though. In fact, I've walked into several R&D labs and seen Formlabs printers collecting dust because they couldn't get support or replacement parts. And when I can replace an entire printer 8 times with next-day shipping and it's still cheaper for significantly higher resolution and faster prints... again, what am I getting here? And I'm not asking as a hobbyist, I ran a 50 printer farm for a couple years.

Formlabs may not deliver on the promise, but that absolutely is the promise. To consumers, a $4500 printer needs to “justify” its price compares to a $500 printer. To a larger company, a $500 printer from an offshore company that doesn’t even pretend to have field support is just a non-starter.

When we were demoing bench scale SLA, we went all-in on Formlabs and were pretty disappointed by the workflow, quality, prices, and resin choices. Not much came of our relationship, and their reps were more interested in upselling than listening or helping us meet our needs. We tried for a few years but decided that they weren't worth paying a premium for.

I feel like they suffer from the same problem as Ultimaker: recalcitrance. They know they have a reliably engineered core product, but they're too intent on capturing sales without acknowledging the value prop of an incredibly competitive advancing market and are slow to innovate.

Fully agree. The Ultimaker 2 launched with a happy fanbase and great upgrades in the pipeline. Back then, it was also all open source. Then it became increasingly clear that all those upgrades were going to become Ultimaker 3 features and everything became more commercial and closed and that really soured the community. By now, I don't think they have any USP left.