I have enjoyed my Ender 3v2 but my extruder and hot end are acting up and I am ready for a more reliable printer. I like the simplicity of Bambu but it seems to come at the cost of customization. Prusa seems to be more open and extendable, but at the cost of increased complexity. What would you recommend?
Honestly, the second half of this post is not a very true statement, and is pretty disingenuous to reality. The Bambu ecosystem can operate independently of Bambu labs if you want/need to, there are plenty of knock off replacement parts to keep it running long term, you can buy all the consumables from amazon/aliexpress and many of the other components. The slicer has a feature rich open source alternative too, so software isn’t an issue. The only thing it has against it is its not open source. I own both a prusa and now 2 Bambu printers. I spent a long time researching what I was going to purchase to upgrade my prusa printers. The mk3.9 upgrade for my mk3s+ was almost the cost of a whole new printer, and new units were more expensive than the p1s. The p1p/s has more build volume, is faster, and has been more reliable and in general usable than my prusa ever was. I want to support prusa but they have fallen way behind in nearly every way. If you don’t want your data collected and you desire privacy you can have that with a closed source product, it’s not impossible. And you can get a better machine at 2/3 the cost of a prusa or a multi material one at the same cost.
I simply do not support any company exploiting an open source community. You will find that the parts availability will disappear as soon as retail availability dies. It happens with all proprietary garbage. The only reason for proprietary in this space is exploitation of the end user.