I think it is interesting that people are still paying for an overpriced machine like a Dimension/Stratasys.
Those machines look overpriced to you, because you're only thinking about your needs, and for those, they may in fact be overpriced. Keep in mind that most of the people here are making parts in a commercial, high-$ setting where "not bad" is "not good enough." With those high-priced machines, you can pretty much count on loading a file, hitting print, and coming back to a finished part in X hours, for days/weeks/months with minimal interruptions. With paid support, when that doesn't happen, you pick up the phone and someone comes and makes it work.
Of course all of this is expensive. But, so is having a machine that fails to print 5-10% of parts well the first time, or that can't print certain parts without a lot of fiddling to deal with the lack of support material or a heated chamber, or having an employee who costs $60k/year with benefits, who can make you $180k in revenue, spend most of a month futzing with a bag of bolts trying to get it to print.
Also, many people here eye the 3DP thing a little skeptically, especially with newcomers, because right now it is going through a major bull$#@! hype phase in popular culture. Media idiots are doing stories that make it sound like we will be printing iPhones in our kitchen before we know it. The guys here are professionals in the business of manufacturing, whose job is to deal with all the details that make the difference between something that is 95% there, and 100% there, like the difference between a part that is +/- .005" in quantity of one, and +/- .0002" in quantity of 1,000. So every time they hear somebody pipe up about how 3D printing is going to revolutionize everything, it's like a major-league player listening to some goober in a sports bar go on about why player X can't hit the ball right.
To be sure, there's a lot of bias embedded in there, too. The first steamships weren't a match for the best sailing ships of their day, but they kept getting better. Additive manufacturing may not take over everything, but as the technology gets better and costs come down, it will have a growing impact. Mori Seiki has a machine
LASERTEC 65 Additive Manufacturing - A DMG MORI World Premiere in 2014 that is getting a lot of attention, and GE is starting to use SLS machines for turbine parts in a production setting. Personally, I tend to think it will be more evolutionary than revolutionary.
