My crazy conspiracy theory is that Makerbot was acquired by Stratasys as a ploy to buy out the most dangerous and high quality big hobbyist 3D printer brand and then torpedo it with value engineering to allow them to sell their own in house brand (uPrint) better. Maybe that&#x27;s not true, but the Gen 5 Replicator was Day 0 garbage.<p>My Replicator Gen 5 was not functional on launch, I never got a good print out of it. The self calibration function was non-functional out of the box after one print, and the inability to manually level was designed out from the Rep2, a design so good, international manufacturers copied it in the form of the Flashforge. The Rep 5 was completely redesigned for no reason, the integral filament reel was intended to bully you into buying Makerbot brand filament on their custom reels, the &quot;new&quot; software made it so you could CHANGE LESS SETTINGS, like you know, temperature, or feed rate. Basically Gen 5 was a corporate ball of dark patterns and poor regressive design, completely overpriced, and shipped before it was ready to boot. One could argue that making the Makerbot brand a more closed design was a choice of positioning, but I feel that is only justified if you can deliver the ease of use value, which Gen 5 didn&#x27;t.<p>Sadly, those Brooklynite&#x27;s jobs might have been doomed when the Stratasys logo first went up on the Makerbot sign.